nice review
About hair, rendering is really slow, but is a know issue, community wait a SP1 with many, different fix

Apparently the Modo 601 trial has finally come online: Try Modo, but it has come online "with a twist". The 15-days "Basic Trial" is available for free, while the 30-days "Production Evaluation" with all kinds of extra goodies, like the "modo Plug-in SDK" will cost you $25 (which apparently will be refunded at purchase). Strange but true... I'd rather have the "standard" 30-days for free without any extras, but Luxology obviously wants to stand out...

They did so every new release. The reason is they want customers download modo and learning software from their tutorials (included in the 25€ materials), a 25$ fee would ensure that trial users puts a minimum effort to learn and not merely serves to mess up their servers.
I think is a bad idea, but seems it work nice because they doing so from early 301 release and don't want cage at all.

IMHO, 30 days are very poor time for evaluate a software, 15 are too short...

You're right, I even knew this,
but seem to have successfully blocked it from memory (or maybe I'm just getting too old...)
What I find even more disturbing however is the fact that it seems all side-grade offers
have expired before the trial came online. This means you had to buy on "blind faith"
just to get the bargain. And that seems to be a weird business model indeed...

They wait SP1 was ready before release Trial. IMO A question of image: users base is loyal (and fanatic), so a buggy release was not a problem, but they aim to gain many new customers with 601 and want trial without some (big) bugs.

In any case, IMHO is a good product. I tried rigging and weight paint, is really good. Modelling are also good and rendering has now many option (I prefer modo rendering to mental ray... yes, I know mental ray has many more feature but love Modo fast preview windows, you can test material fast and simple, and rendering is very nice and setting take few second), also, paint work nice (but cannot blend level, I hope next release). The only drawback, IMHO, actually is viewport: really weak if compared to rock solid softimage.

At the end, a good software, with many promises: Brad Peebler (Lux CEO) said in an interview next release will evolve the compositor capability, node editor for materials and 701 will handle more heavy flux data (this mean more strong viewport. Love Luxology attitude (they care about their product and care about their customers) and you feel their interest and passion.

blind faith seems to be an extreme statement given modo's reputation, but it was strange to do that. =)

Well irequested a trial version before the side grade ended and their support gave me one 30 day full trial.....played with it for one day and realised immediately that it was an awesome piece of kit .worth far more than they were asking for it....so I bought a copy and been smiling ever since. Kinda reminds me of xsi 3 kind of days when xsi started to come into its own .sure it ain't a totally complete end to end tool ,lacking advanced anim stuff and particles but what it does it does very very well .occasionally it crashes but not to the level of say max 4/5 ,but I kind of expected it to and it ain't as bad as some people make out.
After 2 weeks of using it daily , Im falling in love with it .Would recommend it highly to anyone .

Don't know XSI 3, but can affirm now modo 601 sp1 is very stable.
Worth every single cents

Does this mean the SP1 actually fixed most of the "bugginess" I thought I saw being reported on the different forums when 601 was released? That, at least, is very good news...

Well it's stable here.
Anyway, at least from my POV, that is, long time Max and XSI experience....It definitively has a few of *very* interesting techs, let's say raidosity renderer and Ikinema engine, but...both of them have a whole burden of... unusual.. solutions, and unbelievable overcomplicated interface. First some wierd rule, then exceptions of that weird rule. Shader is applied to polygons, not to objects, now when Modo has ( static) particles,
there is 'shader mask" to allow applying to objects. A lot of options which leads to nothing really meaningful..

Imho, renderer is still able to survive against all that unusual stuff, Ikinema, definitively not. There is some kind od automatic envelope assignment, but once you want to add a deformer to existing envelope, procedure that takes a few clicks, both in Max and XSi, suddenly takes more than some ambitious ICE construction.
Lattice deformer doesn't exist ( come on...), cage deoformer doesn't exist too, no quaternions, no this no that, at some point I've stopped with anything, just to keep it good memory.
That is, today, Blender offers a far better balanced set of deformers, as well as everything you want for animation, far better references, x times larger user base.

Modeling offers a few tools that doesn't exist in SI, paint smooth an so. But, as soon it comes even close to advanced (for programmers), relax for example, it become slow, and yes, wit relax, it crashes. Imho, generally, Max is about two times better for modeling, XSI 5... about, four times.

Anyway it seems to be possible to do a "dummy shader assignment" somewhere else, import as obj and replace them in it. Also it saves me of going to Vray and Vray's zillion options, just in order to do a f....ck radiosity kitchen, if there is a need for that.
So it worth every cent of price, licensing scheme is nice too.

An another positive side effect for me, finally I've stopped to hate the Blender UI, now I know it could be worse.