well I would go with Maya 2008 then for making the base mesh of your models, then zbrush for addnig those extra details for the normal map projection.

Haven't UV'd much in Maya but 3dsmax has something called Pelt mapping which makes UVing stuff 10 times faster, I believe maya should have something like that aswell since both is autodesk now, just don't know the features name.

One thing I like about maya also is the paint skin weights tool, where you paint on the model and tell what bones to control which of the painted area, and that way you can have really smooth animations, takes no time to do, don't know if other softwares has this feature, but i'm still in high school last year and we are using maya. But yeah I cba to list all the cool features but maya and 3dsmax is ofc the leading 3D softwares atm, it's like comparing Nvidia vs ATI.

Animating in maya is also really easy once you got your rig ready with IK handles and different constrains + custom attributes for example on the fingers of a characters to rotate them.

Other than that I beleive (think) all the 3d softwares are pretty much has the same features, it's just getting used to the UI, cause if you know how to model, then i'm 100% sure u can use any software after a few days of getting used to it.

Personally I like both max and maya.