hmm, maybe not the right place for the debate, but I went to an autodesk seminar about a couple of months after Autodesk brought out maya 2008 and Max 9 was being demoed.

The guys there were sort of hinting that they were trying to target different customer bases for max and maya, and the demos were geared up to sort of show that. There was a lot of arch vis for max and, trying to best pick my words here, faster and less complicated animation for it (with character studio), but still with high quality results, where Maya was more geared for more "complex" animation and production pipelines, with movie and high end broardcast work (not that Max cant do that).