Short of motion capture or some telemetric input device, I can't think of an easier way to set up poses and animations.

Making use of Poser's wide variety of pre-made pose files can help. You might not find exactly the pose you need, but if you use something close, then it's only a manner of tweaking it for the desired results.

---

Come to think of it, a bipedal or quadrupedal armature rigged with potentiometers would make a great accessory for Poser. The stop-motion wizards at ILM used something like that to animate the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park film while they were learning the software. Create an application that can read the signal over a USB port, and then save the results to a BVH file, and you'd have hands-on control over your figures. I wonder how much something like that would cost?