The best way I have found to answer this question from JavaScript is to create a temporary element, that is not attached to the dom, and read my default values from that. I then test the default values against the values read from the element I'm testing (using jQuery or getComputedStyle) - if they compare then it's a best guess they haven't been set. Obviously this has a downside in the fact that if the element has had it's property set to the exact same value as the default you can't tell the difference.
Something like this
function hasDefaultStyle(elm, prop) {
var def = $('<'+$(elm).attr('tagName')+' />').css(prop);
return $(elm).css('prop') == def;
}
When dealing with different dimension metrics i.e. percent, cm, em and so on - these have to be dealt with in a different way—on browsers other than FireFox at least—due to the computed problem you mention.
FireFox does the right thing in my opinion and that when you request styles from an element that hasn't been placed in the dom it returns the original values i.e. like 50%.
For more information on how to solve at least the percent problem you can see my answer here:
Determine whether element has fixed or percentage width using JavaScript
It is rather ridiculous that such methods are necessary however :/