Maya is not a tool for beginners, Maya is a tool for studios. Its accepted that only people with significant training use maya. So no maya does not even attempt to be beginner firendly. Maya is also not really a modeling tool, but mainly a animation pipeline tool-set. Maya is considerably harder* than many tools, but that's only if you look superficially. Its only hard if your doing the easiest tasks.
But yes the tool your looking for is most probably
Append polygon tool
Moving along axis is built in just use your middle mouse button, or if you dont want to drop your mouse shift+mmb (works on nearly any tool, any function any manipulation). Middlemouse toggles any tool back to edit last done stuff mode aswell.
Anyway, a word of advice. Every tool out there is different you get nowhere if you try to just do the same as in X but in Y. The trick is to understand why it would be useful to do differently. Ideally you would use a different workflow.
You can also opt fo bridge tool.
*If you only intend to do low-poly stuff Maya may not be your kettle of fish.
PS: sorry for the mistakes im a bit rusty havent really done lowpoly modeling in years
PPS: anyway i dont think sketshup is user fiendly so i might agree with you if you has said maya VS modo but ...