Got GNU?
The gnu version of ls has --group-directories-first. And cp has -t.
No GNU?
On systems that don’t have gnu’s ls, your best bet is two successive calls to find with -maxdepth n/-mindepth n and -type t with the appropriate options.
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d
find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 \! -type d
For copying files, with the target first, you would have to write a script that saves the first argument, then uses shift, and appends the argument to the end.
#!/bin/sh
target="$1"
shift
cp -r -- "$@" "$target"