the export in illustrator > flash works really well for me... never had any problems with it. The new illustrator for X doesn't support "auto convert to symbols" probably because sometimes you'd get a library full of 1,000+ images and they just left it out... who knows...
LiveMotion sucks eggs compared to FlashMX, which is a fully functional OOP environment at this point, and I'm thinking they're going to transplant the Director engine over to Flash pretty soon so you can author shockwave from Flash because more people are using Flash.
Freehand obviously works wonders for Flash as they're both Macromedia so editing between the two is smooooth... as I don't use Freehand as my default illustration app I don't have this luxury but if you're just getting into both, one might try Macromedia studio...
As far as the previous cut/paste, save as EPS, etc... totally old school and not neccessary with Illus10 and FlashMX... they play very nicely together...