Transforming video into still images

Are you talking about creating an animated GIF from a video sequence?  If so, you can do that in Premiere Elements also. 

Another way of describing the desired output is as an image sequence, although my original message already states what I want to avoid having to do. It is very easy to create individual clips using a timeline with basic inbuilt Windows software.

Premiere Elements has several tools that should do what you want.  You can use the freeze frame tool to pick a frame in the video timeline and save it to an image file in a folder of your choosing, immediately.   There is also a tool called Magic Moments that will automatically extract several of the best frames from the video and allows you to save them as images to your desktop.

You can get a free trial of the program and see for yourself.    If you have further questions about it, I suggest you ask your question in the Premiere Elements Community Forum.