Well after this, there's pretty much only Maya for high-end character animation and thay have a grip on all the pipeline apps, Modo and Houdini are still not there yet. And when they kill Max next year we'll all be on Maya.
Well, you asked if you can buy XSI. Yes, you can and also get Max or Maya for free. Is it bad? Yeah, super awesome project excalibur from people who can't even code simple scene explorer. :D Creating new 3d package makes no sense for AD atm. They would rather get rid of whole M&E thing. Maya's position is not so firm as…
ICE was extended into modelling under Autodesk but I think that was a continuation of a roadmap, rather than innovation under AD. The sad thing is, XSI was marketed as a companion app rather than a full DCC platform. It always appeared obvious that AD's stable was too full but I'd expected them to strip XSI clean and port…