I've not used Collada so I can't really comment there but every other Poser -> Maya solution (I've tried them all) has issues, so the conversion is never easy or neat.

Rigging characters in Maya is really easy and fast - if your geometry is clean, well organized and lower polygon counts (usually controlling higher density meshes). Daz meshes are extremely dense, which makes the rigging unneccesarily difficult. If you don't believe me, rig one of the LOD meshes from DAZ Studio and you'll see what I mean.

You certainly don't want to use Poser Fusion (or the plug in former known as Body Studio) because you can't use Maya's animation controls on your mesh, which to me, sort of defeats the purpose of using Maya.

Finally you will find that a DAZ mesh imported into Maya will have 36 instances of materials but you only need five since that's how many maps a Mil 3 character has (for example you don't need a separate network for skinTorso and skinArm since they use the same map), which really saves processing power.