So I was reading about how Cameron decided to give breasts to the Na'vi females. His rationale is, "Because the audience is human." Translated, that actually means, "What part of 'lowest common denominator, i.e. hot chicks and shit blowing up' was confusing for you?"
Why not, "Because being able to feed your young from your own metabolism is a winning strategy that occurs in various ways among the Mammalia, Hymenoptera, and many Aves, because the chest is a good spot for bipeds to keep their food delivery system, and because females are more likely to be concerned with the care of the young"?
See, as long as you don't posit something completely impossible—like, say, hive-dwelling, man-sized creatures that use pressurized hydrofluoric acid as a respiratory pigment and can use alien lifeforms as food-sources and incubators for their parasitoid larvae—you can usually come up with a rationale for anything you want about your aliens. Want the animals to be quadripeds? Well, four legs is good for stability, but also simple to control. Want the intelligent life to be bipeds? About half of a whole class of vertebrates became bipeds so they could use their hands to grab prey—we call them dinosaurs. Or maybe your aliens were some sort of arboreal organism, that eventually shifted its adaptations for climbing into adaptations for tool use (you know, like, well, you).
All those people who say humanoid aliens are unrealistic? Idiots. Know why? We got a sample-size of exactly one planet; you can't calculate a realistic set of expectations based on that. We don't actually know which of the conditions of life on this planet are necessary to life. That means we can't assume alien life will be like earth life—but it also means we can't assume it won't.
Roughly humanoid aliens can be defended. There's a reason both insects and vertebrates have heads, with the sensory organs near the nerve centers; there's a reason theropods and humans developed bipedalism. There's a reason opossums, primates, and some dinosaurs developed thumbs. If those reasons, or anything similar, exist on an alien planet, then something similar can evolve there.
However, the fact that it's allowed to be similar, doesn't mean you can be lazy. Try and find analogs that will give the same result. Nobody's expecting you to come up with an entirely new complete ecosystem, but at least mix and match—use plant systems in animals, and vice-versa, or reptile in "mammal." And try and find research papers about whatever you're designing. Did you know Carnivora, ungulates, birds, and fish use completely different structures to create their tapetum lucidum (the shiny thing at the back of the eye)?
The felinoids in my book don't use melanin to block UV, for instance; they use cyanidin (the stuff that makes cranberries and blueberries the color they are). The proteins they're made of are the other chirality from ours (which makes us and them eating each other impossible), and the keratins in their claws and hair are arranged in sheets, like those of birds or reptiles, not helices like mammals'.
It helps to have a rationale for certain things—the felinoids, for instance, are big guys, for whom 7'1" is our 6', the tall end of the average range. They're much, much stronger than humans, too: even their smaller women can kill unarmored humans by slapping. So why did they ever need tool use, or society? Because their planet's crawling with animals scaled for the Pleistocene or even the Mesozoic, not the Holocene—their prey's even bigger and scarier than they are.
Another important issue is, once you figure out your aliens' ecology, remember: they're not determined by it. Your religion, politics, culture, brand preferences, are all infinitely more influential on how you act than the fact you're a plains-dwelling omnivorous primate. Especially since you might be a Colorado vegan. Now there's obviously going to be an influence—the felinoids take to stealth like humans take to throwing things. But rationality is always going to be a bigger influence—they have very strong taboos on deception, because they still need their society to function.
And if you have a planet where the majority of terrestrial animals are quasi-fishlike hexapods, but you make the intelligent race four-limbed humanoids with inexplicable breasts...surely you could be playing with a nice ball, or something, instead?
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