While this would be easier than the fifteen bones that you would otherwise have to deal with, it would not be as easy as it possibly could be.

To make things even easier, we can take advantage of the fact that fingers do not generally move individually. They move in relation to one another.

To demonstrate this to yourself, raise your hand in front of your eyes, with the palm facing you and the fingers extended.  Try to bend -only- your pinky.  Unless you have a severely abnormal physiology (not that there's anything wrong with that), your ring finger, probably your middle finger and possibly even your index finger will have bent as well.

In simple motions, the four fingers of each hand move together like a single wave.  We can create a simple model which will allow you to manipulate that wave, rather than each individual finger.

This is not without disadvantages, however.  There are any number of gestures (even a few obscene ones) that a hand constrained in this manner cannot make. You trade off ease-of-animation for a little bit of detailed control.

Happily, now that you know how to constrain the Thumb, you could use the same technique to individually constrain each finger.  By making two seperate control structures for the hand (one with each finger constrained, and one with the fingers constrained as a group) and swapping them in and out as needed through your animation, you can easily and seamlessly animate the hand to whatever level of detail is required.

Because the individual constraint of each finger would not demonstrate anything more than the tutorial has already shown you, it is left as an exercise to the reader.  If you need to do it, it should be fairly obvious how to pull it off.

For the "Wave method" of hand animation, go on to the next page.
 
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