Yes, Blender is a good and cheap alternative to many tools. But all the points you mentioned are available in Modo as well. So you dont have to switch applications like you said. You have a superb unwrapper there, great 3d-painting where you can paint color, textures, procedural brushes and much more. You can do great sculpting, very powerful now in 501. The modeller is first class, you have everything even smoothing groups for game developers.

Blender can beat Modo currently when it comes to character animation though. Modo is best suited to animate technical objects currently. But CA will probably come in the next version.

So there are indeed alternatives. And one reason why I prefer Modo over Blender is: It just works. I can read and write OBJ, LWO, DAE or FBX without any problems. It can even store ASE files that work in UDK with second uv-set and collision geometry included. Also FBX and DAE store second uv-set, layers and even smoothing groups.
I can open the Modo-FBX in Maya, Unity or Ultimate Unwrap3D. It just works. In Blender only one direction worked. So it saves me a lot of trouble every week when we publish new model packs.