This question appears to be dead, but in case somebody wanders across it as I did, there is also the paralist package which provides asparaitem and asparaenum environments, which do precisely this.
paralist also provides the inparaenum environment, which is designed for in-paragraph lists: something like "There are three ways to get there: one can (1) turn left, (2) turn right, or (3) go straight." You could use this environment and if you want you can insert your own paragraph breaks. This gives a flush enumerate but with indentation at the beginning of a paragraph. If it comes to that, maybe you should just use \paragraph.
