If you do want to make clothing match the skin (which is a nice elegant solution if odne right) use the copy skin weights command, in 2008 its just the ticket, the only thig you'll lack is the deformations in the cloth due to gravity and effects, but if you then make the skirt cloth after that (ncloth that is) is will still follow thte original mesh.

Edit - It's also faster on the nucleus solver and a lot easier to set up than painting weights (its also autodesk's recommended workflow with ncloth or it was at least)