Maya and Softimage are quite different "under the hood". The architecture of SI is a modern extensable architecture that is easily modified--it is an object oriented architecture while Maya's architecture is of the generation of SI3D, which is to say pre-XSI--last century. Since Maya was owned by SGI and SGI was losing money big time, SGI radically lowered the price of Maya instead of investing in an expensive rewrite. That was a very good business decision as XSI 1.o was a disaster, Softimage had to give and support their old app, SI3D, away with every purchase of XSI through version 3.0.
Anyway, sorry jabrabaig, Softimage 2010 is far superiour under the hood. I have both Maya 2010 and Soft 2010 and training in both. Softimage's arhcitecture makes it much more intuitive. SI's GUI is cleaner, easier to use and easier to learn.