I personally use Blender fairly extensively. I've played around with Maya quite a bit as well and I've found that Blender is the easiest for what I like to do. (ie simple modeling and other non organic renders) Maya is really stinking awesome and fairly simple to use, but it's just too much for modeling the Enterprise or something like that.
The only problem with Blender, that I can see, is that there's a huge learning curve. It's not like anything else out there. If you've been stuck with Windows all your life, and are not used to using different types of control schemes, Blender is going to through you for a loop. The good news is that it just takes practice. Build a few simple things first, to get your bearings, and then build from there.