I'm very late, but I thought I'd chime in on this subject, in case someone might be interested later.
I used Maya 5/6 fairly extensively, and I currently use Blender. Maya is, as expected, a very powerful program, and you can certainly do whatever your mind and skill allow you to do with it. The downside, mainly, is that all of that comes at a cost. Maya, itself, is very expensive, and anyone using this platform should obviously expect any third-party add ons to be expensive too.
Blender is free and open-source, but can't compare with Maya in terms of total features. However, it does come pretty close in most respects, and probably only the most advanced of advanced users will ever feel like they will hit a wall. A common complaint leveled against Blender is that the interface is "too difficult," which, frankly, I think is asinine. There's this general expectation amongst a lot of people, I think, that if it is "free/open source," then it should act as an "imitation" of paid software--i.e., Linux should be a "free" imitation of Windows. Instead, Blender, like all of the very different and proprietary 3D programs out there, has its own interface, and I frankly prefer it to Maya's interface. The simple keyboard shortcuts alone, once memorized, are fantastic.
Of course, I'm not going to say that Blender is perfect, but what's really going for it is the fact that it has a very driven and dedicated team of developers, who have made an awful lot of progress in a very short period of time. Blender in 2007 is vastly different than Blender in 2002; you generally can't say the same about Maya or the other programs in terms of these past five years. And I'd say that those obvious shortcomings that Blender has are very quickly going to be history over the next year or two.
And, yes, Blender does animations.
I know that some people are afraid that learning a program like Blender will put you at a disadvantage if you try and look for paid 3D work. I, on the other hand, generally enjoy learning new software, so I'm glad I know Maya and Blender (and I might potentially start learning Cinema4D this coming year, since it is used in broadcast TV quite a bit). Knowing Maya, as I did, made it easier to pick up Blender, since I already understood how 3D software works.
I hope someone finds this useful.