Hi ClansFear,
The third person animation is intentionally positioned that way so that if you were creating animations where the characters faced each other the math for their opposite rotations would be more intuitive (ie. 0 & 180 vs 90 & 270 for starting positions.)
One way you can accomplish what you are trying to do is export the 3rd person skeletal mesh as an fbx, open in a 3D editor program, rotate it 90 degrees and then re-import it into the 1st person template.