Not sure of the details of your need, but setting up a CiviCRM Profile is a good approach to using a form to get data into CiviCRM.

3. I don't imagine there is something for Drupal akin to

FacileForms - a form generator for Mambo/Joomla? I would like to develop a registration form that links to CiviCRM, but right now I am considering authoring some sort of trigger which will move records from my Mambo db to the Drupal db. This could be avoided if I could simply do a form in Drupal.

--snip I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for but there is a web forms module that can be downloaded and used in drupal. It ain't perfect, but if you form needs are simple enough it may do the job well enough for you. --snip