Yes, it does loose a bit of ranking power, albeit this is very minimal (just as much as with a regular link btw as Matt Cutts specifies here:
http://youtu.be/Filv4pP-1nw). You can of course add a link manually right within the template itself if this is paramount to what you're trying to achieve.
I would stay away from "nofollow" (and what's the point of 301 loss if you're going to no follow anyway?), instead look into what seotoaster offers in terms of page rank sculpting
http://www.seotoaster.com/link-siloing.html , there is a short video explaining it. That's the proper way to do it, and seotoaster does it for you like no other system.
Finally, we will add to the feature request list direct off-site menu insertion as it is useful indeed. Thanks for the feedback, It is most welcome :-).