Actually, I find Maya's snapping a lot easier to use than Max's. With single toggle keystrokes, you can snap to grid, curve, or vertex. The snap align tools in Maya 4.5 are also very powerful if you take the time to get into them. I like the simplicity of Max's single dialog box, but, to me, there is more flexibility in Maya.

Maya's Outliner takes a bit of getting used to, if you're coming from Max, but it is incredibly powerful and flexible. In the Outliner, you can sort the list however you like simply by manually dragging items up and down the list or by changing options in the Display and Show panel menus. The Show Selected Type(s) option is especially useful. For instance, say you only want to see poly and nurbs objects in Outliner. Select one poly shape and one nurbs shape in the scene. Go to Outliner | Show | Show Selected Type(s). The Outliner will now only show poly and nurbs objects. If you want to cull cameras from the list, select Show | Objects | Cameras and then select Show | Invert Shown. Cameras will now not show up in Outliner.

Transitioning from Max to Maya involves unlearning some habits. It just takes some time to find the equivalent features and processes from one program to the other. In general, everything works the same or similarly.