Quote - I am hoping that for $179 I can move a Poser scene, with dynamic hair, cloth animation, and procedural shaders into Max and with little/no fuss light/render there with a terrific increase in overall speed. We will see.

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This is where I think you will be greatly disappointed.  Maybe if you get the new 64 bit max, it will be better going, but in max 7 at least, rendering the dynamic hair that bodystudio brought over was definitely much faster when using the scanline renderer, but the scanline renderer isn't good for animation.  You need to beef up the antialiasing to get nice results on textures and edges, and this will slow it down to near poser speed anyway.  Max can do procedurals, but they aren't in the same ballpark as poser in my opionion.  Procedual materials in max get mapped to object coordinates by default, which is fine for 80% of the time, but  this is no good for animated objects like poser figures, because it makes the procedurals look like they are swimming through the object.  and if you make them explicit mapped- meaning they follow the normals of the objects uv coordinates,then you might end up with some size/scale problems that are a pain.  I'm not a max pro by any means, so these were the things about it that really frustrated my experience with it.