I find the Persona R-Click/Move command preferable to actually connecting my character to a path for walking along said path. Being able to have the character walk to, and then along the path with the animation speed and translation speed already matched is much easier than the alternative method of picking the path, aligning the character, and then matching the animation and translation speed.

Here is my suggestion to make the R-click/move even better, In steps I think would work well.

1) Create a Persona animation in iClone or 3DX that would be comprised of multiple animations in a blend tree, much like game engines use to have animation and translation speeds change.

2) Create a path for character locomotion.
3) Specify points (existing control points would be good) at which there should be a speed change. For example; the first point would be a speed of zero, and the 2nd point would be a speed of 25, the third 50, the 7th back to 25, and the 9th back to zero. Skipping points should be allowed.

The idea here is that there would an animation associated with each speed, and they would be blended between and have translation speed changes between user selectable points along the path.

The clip would not be finalized in the timeline until all the speed changes were done, because changing the speed would need to change the duration of the clip.

For movie making, we could certainly benefit from the "game-like" behavior, but still be "animating" it rather than trying to move the character around in real-time like a game.