As a technical artist, I would be happy to get rid of Max, if only Maya had some comparable workflow for complex, iterative highpoly asset creation. I can model a detail-heavy, complicated mesh twice as fast in Max than I can in Maya, and that’s even WITH plugins like NEX to improve the modelling workflow.
From a scripting point of view though, I have to say I prefer Maya. There’s generally much more functionality, it’s more consistent, the debugging is slightly nicer IMHO.
As it is, speaking as a modeller, I just can’t get behind Maya yet. Its polygon editing tools are stuck in the late '90s (no soft selection until Maya 2008 SP2?). UV tools aren’t much better (no soft selection AT ALL?).