Generally it is a combination of characters and actions that take on a similar role as symbols in Flash. AS and Flash are completely different animals and as such there is no direct correlation.

I work in Flash on a daily basis as an interactive tool, I don't however use it for animation, especially in the case of character work. I've just started learning it myself and while I HATE the drawing tools, the animation tools really are powerful once you get your head around the concepts.

I was recently playing with the lipsyncing capabilities and came up with this (some of you will recognize the slightly modified plasma boy image, drawn in Xara)

http://capefearwriters.org/images/test.mov

Not exactly high art but it was a good intro for me into lipsyncing and importing xara files into AS (via ai format)