Basics, yea, but you can do much less with the basic in blender than you can with the basics in other programs, stuff like procedural generation and physics simulation and advanced optical effects are much much further away, and really needed if you want anything good.
Blender is good for causal peaple doing MS piant level doodles, or for making models for some indie game or mod or visualization software, but doing artwork and serious movies with it, while possible, fall into the same category as [bizarre item] stop motion, or that one guy who makes hyper detailed sculptures inside the eyes of needles, etc.
Not to derail this thread, but WHOA ... bit of disinformation there. MS paint level doodles? Check out the Blender.org gallery. Fluid simulation, physics, particle sim, hair/fur ... all of that is very much present (without additional plugins). Procedural systems are easy to utilize (and extend with Python, which is superior to MEL). The quality of the artist determines the quality of the final output, not the tools used.
And I say this as a Maya user. Blender has excellent capabilities. Check out the sculpting tools, the awesome (way better than Autodesk) unwrapping tools (even beats Max's pelt system), the soft-body system ... heck, just visit
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/feature-videos/ and see some demonstrations.
Compare and contrast software by all means. But don't make things up! The interface is quite a bit different, but certainly fast (far more keyboard-centric than Maya, and you can easily code your own hot box / marking menus or use pre-existing ones).
But anyway. Yeah. All 3D software is capable of making great art. It's the artist that delivers quality (or lack of quality), every contemporary and popular 3D app available today is far better than anything the pros were using 10 years ago.
MS Paint. *shakes head sadly* Wow. Big Buck Bunny (
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/) ain't MS Paint, and those guys are not Pixar-level professionals. Still, good results.