are there any functions like Max's in Maya?
like the spherify where you can select a cubed area of vertices and tweak the settings to pull them into a sphere
I think you could do what you are asking but offhand I don't know of a specific function like that. You could use artisan to paint round buldges on a surface. There's a mel script that wil morph between a cube and a sphere. What would you use this for?
you can play with the sculpt modifiers. i think there might also be a spherify mel script as well.
There is no spherify in Maya like there is in Mirai and Max. It would have to be scripted either by piping the vertices thru sphere equation or using a nurbs sphere with closestPointOnSurface node. It wouldn't be anywhere near as interactive as in Mirai and Max.
As temporal mentioned...sculpt deformer can work for you depending on the effect you want.
I think theres a sript that does this on highend its name was ... dont remember but it wasnt realy that intuitive.