Oh yea, it works great for a few reasons:
It quickly creates a great looking shape so you can push the character's look and designer further faster, and it gets a good looking base down with minimal polygons saving a lot of clean-up and optimizing.
Last character I used the method on was this (unfinished). I stripped out all the shapes with planes, so his visual exterior is solid, but inner core is completely open and optimized, which keeps the polycount extremely low and character strong.
http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/7...icoma038qo.jpg