What's really huge here is being able to interface open-source software with the commercial rendering pipeline that is used to make most of the movies we watch.
I had a big fight with my 3d modeling instructor who made us use 3ds max because he wrote the Adobe Press book on it, though he not very subtly suggested that we would have to pirate it in order to do our homework. I pushed really hard to be allowed to do work in Blender, wasn't a win at the time, but I think this is clearly the direction things will go - the days of paying thousands of dollars for content creating software that is primarily used by a handful of companies are numbered. Companies like Pixar and ILM should be contributing to projects like Blender instead of developing proprietary internal tools and marrying themselves to packages like Maya that aren't terribly better than Blender, if they even are better at all anymore.
Blender has some quirks, esp in modeling from what I remember, but it's solid, and more importantly, there are room for lots of tools, just not lots of tools that break the bank. This is a hobby for everyone it's not a profession for, and even the professionals are often contractors who struggle to maintain a toolkit.
Anyway, <3 Blender. :)