Specifically, Max unifies (many) editing operations on the modifier stack. An object is the result of a sequence of operations on meshes/paths/patches/etc, from a root creation facility.
In Max you can take a torus, say, apply materials, move it about, distort the mesh, apply physics settings, and then go back to the first modifier and change the torus' inner radius.
In Blender, although you can parametrically create a torus with the same options as in Max and customize those settings immediately afterwards, once you edit the created mesh in any way - or even just select another object - you can't edit those settings any more: it becomes "just a mesh".
Max has mesh editing as a stage in the modifier stack (it also has Blender-style "real" mesh editing). You can layer multiple mesh edits on top of each other and toggle each off or whatever you like. Blender can do the same thing, but as shape keys. Both applications can make the same edits to a mesh, but in Blender they can't apply at different points in the modifier stack: they're all effectively applied before all the actual modifiers.
Now, I was doing 3d, cartoony animation when I was working in Maya, and one could argue that non-destructive tools aren't that applicable to that context anyways. Fair enough -- if you need to change the inner radius of a torus after you've distorted the whole torus, Blender has a fairly mature add-on called sverchok: https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok
You probably heard years ago. Blender has changed _a lot_ in the last 10 years.
It's quite the opposite to me. Blender has sensible names (object, mesh, scene) and a few somewhat weird ones (armature for skeleton, shape keys for morph targets). You can search any action with space bar. You can customize keys and set left click as default for selection.
With zbrush I couldn't figure out. "Subtool" still baffles me. I use a AHK script to make it manageable. Sometimes I don't know what's going on (why can't I edit?) and I don't have a log of actions (like blender) to help me figure that out. The thing I hate the most about zbrush, though, is not the UI, but the lack of poly group names (changing randomly if you add/remove one) and the fact that is completely impossible to export/import more than one paint layer at a time.
Similarly I use Sublime Text and I've tried vim some 10 times and it's also not for me.
I also used 3DS Max around version 4 for a class. The UI was more intuitive, and I felt like it would be comparatively painless to learn to do some impressive things relatively quickly...but doing 3D work as a hobbyist, and not one with much money when I was the most interested, Blender became my default. Gmax was pretty cool too, but at the time I was more interested in making pretty renders on a Linux machine, and less interested in creating game content on a Windows machine.