Carrara, IMHO, is closer to 3DMax, lightwave, blender etc.  It can create photo realistic furniture, homes, aircraft, electronic equipment (everything hard body).  It can create walls, windows window, door framing etc.  It can create temples, castles, planets etc.

It can do all of this because it has a spline and extremely powerful vertex room where the only shapes that you can't create are those you can't imagine.

It also has a powerful texture room that rivals most industrial standard texturing.

You can also create uv maps on each part for precise placement of decals, textures etc.

Additionally, you can group and export your creation as an .obj into any program that accepts .objs.

It also has a conversion process strickly for Pose that retains all textures.

It has an excellent picture preview mode where you just rectangular trace around the object and a photo realistic picture is generated.  That is great for checking your textures, shadowing etc.

Oh yes, it also has a scene creation function where you can generate terrain and landscape it and texturize it with the encluded textures or your own.

How it compares to Bryce for modeling--Carrara is lightyears ahead,  for scene generation, a toss up. 

Ease of getting your head around it.  Fairly easy compared to Maya, 3DStudio, Lightwave,  Zbrush etc.  Not as easy as Poser which is just dial flipping.

It's sister software is called Hexagon (which is strictly modelling and you have to bring up the model in Carrara for proper viewing.  Jan