In some ways, morph target animation can be considered to be a limited form of skeletal animation wherein we manipulate vertices directly instead of bones. The main benefit of this is that it allows very fine and precise manipulations, although with a very high investment in terms of time.
Sometimes, however, this process can be automated to a certain degree, such as in the case of facial animations. In particular, the synchronization of speech with lip movements and that of the surrounding area has seen significant investments in automation. Pieces of both free and non-free software for making morph target animation easy exist, even for those who aren't vertex artists. Some examples of such pieces of software include FaceFX and Sintel, and even Blender has some support.