First off, XSI sell their product(s) far cheaper than that. They even released a free version of Softimage. Houdini used to be extremely powerful, but due to its old age, it just doesn't work that well any longer. I consider LightWave to be one of hte most powerful applications as it has THE best modeling tools and the best rendering engine, although Maya has a live renderer. Did you know that a lot of the Maya projects (i.e. the Final Fantasy movie) used LightWave for modeling?

"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram