Taking up your EDIT (which has been removed while I wrote this, so the answer may be outdated) and the answer of Peter Grill, I come to the following conclusions:
pgfplots only supports one color per patch segment. The best it provides is to support a color map (for example colormap/blackwhite
).
The label placement is a bug in the default label styles - apparently, it tries to place them for the default axis lines=box
. A work-around is presented below. I add that to the pgfplots bug list.
Here is the suggested modification:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.3}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
axis lines=center,
axis on top,
xlabel={$x$}, ylabel={$y$}, zlabel={$t$},
domain=0:1,
y domain=0:2*pi,
xmin=-1.5, xmax=1.5,
ymin=-1.5, ymax=1.5, zmin=0.0,
every axis x label/.style={at={(rel axis cs:0,0.5,0)},anchor=south},
every axis y label/.style={at={(rel axis cs:0.5,0,0)},anchor=north},
every axis z label/.style={at={(rel axis cs:0.5,0.5,0.9)},anchor=west},
samples=30]
\addplot3 [surf, colormap/blackwhite, shader=flat] ({x*cos(deg(y))},{x*sin(deg(y))},{x});
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
The key at={(rel axis cs:<x>,<y>,<z>)}
denotes a location in "relative limits" where 0 means "lower limit" and "1" means "upper limit". The placement is thus adopted to your specific example: "0.5" is the middle of an axis due to the symmetry in your example. The label placement can be adjusted using xshift
or yshift
.
EDIT:
After fixing bugs in the back-end of pgfplots, I took the chance to implement something with fancy colors. Now, the development version of pgfplots supports a different colormap for the "other side" of the patch:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
axis lines=center,
axis on top,
xlabel={$x$}, ylabel={$y$}, zlabel={$t$},
domain=0:1,
y domain=0:2*pi,
xmin=-1.5, xmax=1.5,
ymin=-1.5, ymax=1.5, zmin=0.0,
every axis x label/.style={at={(rel axis cs:0,0.5,0)},anchor=south},
every axis y label/.style={at={(rel axis cs:0.5,0,0)},anchor=north},
every axis z label/.style={at={(rel axis cs:0.5,0.5,0.9)},anchor=west},
mesh/interior colormap name=hot,
colormap/blackwhite,
samples=10,
samples y=40,
z buffer=sort,
]
\addplot3 [surf, shader=faceted] ({x*cos(deg(y))},{x*sin(deg(y))},{x});
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
hide axis,
xlabel=$x$,ylabel=$y$,
mesh/interior colormap name=hot,
colormap/blackwhite,
]
\addplot3 [domain=-1.5:1.5,surf, shader=faceted] {-exp(-x^2-y^2)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
This might eventually become interesting once the version is stable.