You can get the microsoft gif animator for free which works fine for me. It doesn't have many bells and whistles, but it does the job and makes a nicely compressed file. Better the do the heavy lifting in a sequence editor like after efx anyway.
Imageready works wonders for creating animated graphics but there are free alternatives as well. GIMP is able to create animated GIF graphics and I am sure you can find a great tutorial on how to make an animated graphic using GIMP by searching google
Agreed. Also, since GIF animations are fairly basic, you can do fairly well with those free GIF animator demos/programs from download.com.
I stopped using Adobe Image Ready (version 7 was running those days) because I found Macromedia Fireworks. Vector scaling and the optimization capabilities for static and animated images made me switch to it. And now as part of Adobe's family, it's makes even easier building a website when you are multitasking between Illustrator, Dreamweaver and/or Flash. Adobe discontinued Image Ready in CS3, but you can still have a bite of it on Photoshop, because they kept it's ability to do animations. So, if you have it, try it. Maybe you won't need any additional software and, of course, save a couple of hundreds.
If you have Photoshop CS3 installed on your machine then maybe this tutorial will be of help: Animated GIFs and Photoshop CS3 | Rauru.com
its probably been said already, but imageready and fireworks. Imageready gives you the awesomeness of Photoshop (sorta) plus that ability to make animated GIFS. I started out with Fireworks, and it works just as great too, but Im an Adobe person myself