This question doesn't have any direct answer. It depends a lot on other parameters.

You can google to sort out something, but other then that, either this is gonna be a huge comparison among features(which wont make any sense at all) or a straight forward answer to pick x or y. But, in short, XSI's ICE is very tempting for VFX but other then that 3ds Max and Maya is vastly superior. 3ds dominated gaming industry and Maya the movie industry. *From my experience its easy to do easy things in 3ds max and easier to do hard things in maya.*

You can even try out [Blender](http://www.blender.org) & see if it fits your need. [Houdini](http://sidefx.com/) offers procedural modeling solution. Which is awesome too!

Another thing is that you are trying to find out the best solution for almost everything, but differnt situation demands different solutions. For gaming blender can provide an excellent all around solution. The latest installment of Duke Nukem, the developers are using blender(don't know on how extent) for rigging & animation.

The basic functionality remains same across all the applications.For modeling you need some basic tool like extrusion, beveling, splitting edges etc etc. All this features are available in all tools. It's just a matter to get used to then. Unless you become a high level user the output wont different for using different software.

Its all vague, but if you ask which one is best to start with, I would say Maya. You can switch to anything later on, depending on what the time and situation demands.