Thank you Brian - that was a good overview :)

And if you have no money Blender can be an excellent choice :) What do you want more :)
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/
* Very fast inbuilt raytracer
* Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
* Tile-based and fully threaded
* Render layers and passes
* Render baking to UV maps and object to object baking (full render, ambient occlusion, normals, textures)
* Render engine tightly integrated with the node compositor
* Halo, lens flares and fog effects
* Vector motion-blur post-process effect (using node compositor)
* Realistic defocus (DOF) post-process effect (using node compositor)
* Edge rendering for toon shading
* Interactive preview rendering panel in any 3d view
* Ambient Occlusion
* Radiosity solver
* Export scripts available for external renderers such as Renderman, Povray, Virtualight, Lux, Indigo and V-Ray - See Resources for a full list. http://www.blender.org/download/resources/#c571

* Diffuse shaders such as Lambert, Minnaert, Toon, Oren-Nayar, Lambert
* Specular shaders such as WardIso, Toon, Blinn, Phong, CookTorr
* Node editor for creating and mixing complex materials
* PyNodes: write your own Python shaders with realtime feedback, no need to compile
* Material previews rendered by main render engine
* Fast, realistic subsurface scattering
* Blurry reflections and refractions
* Tangent shading to give any shader an anisotropic effect
* Versatile procedural textures system
* Reflection maps
* Normal, displacement and bump maps

hehe, looks ok - but I guess the main thing I'm after is a good interface, and nice easy modelling.

I tried Blender a tiny bit, but the interface isn't terribly good :)

(reminded me a little of zbrush LOL)

Both have interface that you must to learn in deepth ;)
But both are hugely insanely whacking exceedingly bitterly extremely poweful and first in their category ;)

I said a few days ago "What is and when exactly does this pink dots appear in modo, I have been working in modo for quite awhile now and I haven't noticed it?"

Now I have seen it!, damn what a heck is this? pink dots? they seem to happen only when exporting from Moi as a .lwo

Is there any solution to avoid these, are they bad vertices...?

Hi olio,

It has nothing to do with the geometry (I guess), but it more depends of the surface/lighting settings. I had this kind of trouble with MoI geomtry (once), but also
with models build inside modo.

This pink dots are 'rendering error', some kind of division by zero stuff, I don't know more.

Try to change some lighting settings (reducing lighting power), disable any hdri env map, remove reflection/splecular on the surface that seems giving pixel of the death, until you find what appends ... and maybe create a bug report with a scene sample, so they can fix it.

SP2 is supposed to come at the end of the month, I hope it will be completely fixed :S

This may seem 'non-traditional' but I would suggest Hexagon and Carrara Pro as excellent companion applications for MoI.

Hexagon is a decent enough polygon modeler, same for Carrara for the texturing, lighting, animation, and rendering. The cost of ownership of these apps is low, much lower than anything else except Blender, and the learning curve is somewhat gentle.