I can't get gcc to compile DevIL library
As for your first question: The cleaner alternative to symlinking would be to add /Developer/usr/bin to your $PATH, so the other utilities needed for compilation can be found. That's easy to do:

export PATH=$PATH:/Developer/usr/bin


You could put that into ~/.profile so the path get set each time you open a terminal window.

And I'm certainly not a GCC/LLVM expert, but to me it seems like DevIL's configure script does expect a different version of gcc, one which doesn't expect an argument to the -V switch. My best bet would be to ask around on the DevIL developer's mailing list, as there probably are people who have been confronted with the same problem.