I agree and disagree with several points here.

Vue xStream and Infinite mostly kick butt and are far better / easier / more intuitive than any landscape generator that I've used so far. Major plus: the function generator used to create procedural textures. It is very powerful and open ended, and far superior to using texture maps (except perhaps product labels). Major minus: its rendering speed is kinda slow (compared to Renderman / mental ray) due to its aggressive super-sampling, but I'm looking to rectify this by pre-filtering textures with the aforementioned function editor.

Sorry for stepping on toes but I find Max nearly unusable and highly un-intuitive (had to use it for school, after playing with Maya for three years). I find Maya deep but approachable and very user friendly. The coolest thing about Maya is that you can strip it down to its kernal and design your own UI which requires a little scripting skill. It handles modeling, UV mapping, dynamics and many other functions that some use "utility" programs for, and its price was recently slashed again.

Used Poser for a long time but I found it too unstable and slow. Currently using Quidam; there's not as much content for it but the ability to export low poly meshes (which are then subdivided in Maya) fits nicely into my workflow.

16 materials, ha! I wish. Currently set designing the interior of a house for a short film. I don't know how many materials I need so far, but it's at least 50 and that doesn't include "hero" objects.

Photoshop is my image editor. I'm not a big fan of the Adobe interface but I think the breadth of what it can do more than makes up for it. Currently not using a displacement modeler, so I can't comment there. Currently using Renderman for image output. The UI is so-so (renders from the command line) and the names of functions aren't consistent with other apps (texture placement nodes are called "manifolds" for who knows what reason), but it's render speed (especially with motion blur), image quality and it's ability to chew away at billions of real / not instanced polys is unparalleled.

Ultimately I think whatever gets you the fastest / easiest development time is probably the one(s) to use.