I will never buy Autodesk product again. I'd rather get to grips with Blender.
Added: To elaborate, I see nothing in Maya and Max that gives me an advantage over Blender without having to shell out even more money on top or hire a programmer, and if the GUI is horrible in Blender, believe me when I say moving from Softimage3D>XSI>Softimage to Maya or Max after c. 25 years of the bliss that was the Soft GUIs is only a tad less painful. And Blender's free. And Cycles can now bake, and it's free, and it uses the GPU. Did I mention it's free? I'll be losing ICE eventually, so screw it (there was a reason why Autodesk were desperate to make sure you could get ICE particles into Max and Maya), I'll either learn how to programme or get Houdini. Never, ever, ever, ever, put all of your faith into a single company's products, no matter how much they promise you your livelihood is safe in their hands (again and again and again).