Rotating joints (or other chains - Maya-like)

[fjg]

When I used to use Maya, the rotation of hierarchies like joints and other objects seemed a lot more straight forward - make a skeleton, or object chain, select the entire chain and using local rotations, just click the rotation manipulator (anywhere, not axis specific). The result is that it rotates each object in the chain all at once.

With SI, this doesn't happen. Especially when using joints, it seems that you can only use 'Add' mode to get the joints to rotate at their natural pivots, when rotating more than one at a time. The drawback with add mode is that you have to use a single axis - you can't just grab the manipulator anywhere and rotate on multiple axis at once.

I realize that gimbal situations can occur when rotating on multiple axis, but fixing that in the fcurve editor is easy (at least it was in maya).

Is there a way to simulate this interaction in SI?