What you need to understand, is that there is no "right" way of doing things in Maya. There are many ways to do what you want to do.
What you already said is one way.
Another is to open the camera's attribute editor, under environment, map the texture.
If you wanted, you could connect nodes together in the hypershade.
And if you really wanted to, you could even use MEL to do it.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.