While blender is superb for modeling, its video capabilities are somewhat inferior. It is rather more cumbersome in animation than its commercial alternatives, though still decent.
It's game engine, though often touted, is hell to work with. I had to wrestle with it endlessly for even a simple lightcycle game that takes less than an hour in pygame.
Blender has really gotten impressive over the past few years. Back when I did computer art it was far inferior to the professional packages. Lacking alot of creature comforts I looked for and downright missing a number of important features. Suddenly it seems to have all of them. and what's more it seems to have one of the slicker interfaces. I remember being very confused by its interface when I used it a few years ago.
Someday, one of the big studios will adopt blender internally instead of paying through the nose for Maya, and Blender will get really solid.
Frankly, I'm surprised that medium sized studios haven't realized that working together on Blender is a great alternative to the closed proprietary packages or building up a huge in-house dev team.
The problem is that the cost of Maya seems expensive to the student or casual 3D artist, but it's actually peanuts for a full-time visual effects company; it probably works out to less than the cost of the hardware -- certainly less than a month of employee costs. If you add in the network effects of reduced training costs, "standard" formats, and consultant availability, Maya may actually be cheaper than Blender... at least in the current market.
I wouldn't look to a big studio to change the situation, either. They are not "paying through the nose"... In fact, they are in a good position to negotiate even cheaper prices and better service than smaller studios.
Any initial adoption will come from small, independent groups that teach themselves Blender in school, end up preferring it to the big packages, and don't mind that this keeps them from working at larger studios.
I guess what I meant is that the alternative to blender isn't Maya - Maya is a closed system (yes, it has plugins and scripting, but you can't change the internals, which are pretty messy). Right now the biggest studios are choosing to build their own proprietary platforms (ILM, Pixar, DD, Disney, DWA, etc) and replicate work instead of collaborating on an open-source platform.
It's an opportunity for a medium sized studio to start taking a competitive advantage in technology, imho.
Blender has also got fantastic video tutorials that makes it very easy to learn the incredibly powerful interface. To the beginner it's like sitting down with VI the first time, but watch a few screen tutorials and you're up and running in no time.
It's game engine, though often touted, is hell to work with. I had to wrestle with it endlessly for even a simple lightcycle game that takes less than an hour in pygame.