well you can achieve same goals with 3ds, xsi or maya, each one of the 3 programs have their strenghts and weaknesses, being xsi my tool of choice i strongly recommend it because its interface is by far (imho) the most intuitive and ensures a very fast workflow both in modeling and animation.
3ds is the most supported, with tons of plugins and 3rd party addons (and render engines), so it’s a powerhouse and you are almost 100% sure that f you need a plugin/script to prepare you the coffee early in the morning, well max has it :lol: . Native Animation (and weighting/skinning) tools not so user friendly (but i used it only twice to animate and rig something so take this information as it is, ie by a not expert level user).
Maya is another powerhouse, used in the most of productions (here in Italy everybody uses maya!!! how hard to find some xsi works! :D), having used it in few projects i found it really good but with a somewhat scary interface (i always get confused by maya hotbox system), even though you can totally customize it. also well supported with cool addons and plugins, so if it lacks a certain feature you are almost sure you will find an addon integrating it.
being said that, it’s up to you, simply try all of these and go with the one you feel most comfortable with, if you plan to use it to get some job in cg then go with the most popular (generally speaking, maya for vfx and 3ds for videogame productions)
And, lastly, you could also take a look to other low poly modeling packages (modo, silo, blender, etc), i have no experience with those so leave comments to most experienced users:)