Counterparty escrows tokens immediately when an order is placed. Since it cannot escrow bitcoin, the BTCPay transaction is required and Counterwallet takes care of BTCPay as long as you keep it open while your BTC-selling trades are live. Therefore it doesn't take more manual work but adds some uncertainty to a trade as it's not very clear if/when your order will be matched.

Token to token trades are final as soon as orders are matched so would be better if trading from XXXX to YYYY where the XXXX/YYYY pair doesn't have as much liquidity as either the XXXX/XCP or YYYY/XCP pairs and time is of the essence.