i love maya for the sake of hypergraph and hypershade.
i'm not too conversant with Max, but i don't think it has any tool that comes close.
the way you can see all the nodes interworking with each other, it's quite amazing.
in maya the tools are not as user-friendly as Max, but, once you understand how the nodes work with each other, things start to get a lot easier.
i needed to learn textures recently and i didn't quite understand how they worked together, until i started to look more closely in the hypershade work area.

hey, do we have any experts on UVs here? it's very confusing for me...