It appears that Blender's curve points have transform attributes associated with them. Meaning, translate, rotate and scale. Whereas Maya only has translate in the form of position. Blender's approach is very useful!
To do the same in Maya, you would need to put a transform node (locator, circle, etc.) along the curve. Using circles, you would just loft them and control the circles. Rotate and scale. But if you translate the circle, you would start to deviate from the original curve. Now whether this is acceptable is up to you. But to mimic the Blender example, for translation, you would want to translate the curve point. So to have a user experience like the one in Blender, you would need to rig it so that translate, rotate and scale is controllable with a single controller.
