I've heard it's used to make good normalmaps for models made in other programs.

Does Zbrush even do animating?
I haven't looked at it in a very long time.

Yes Zbrush does have a huge amount of detail... It'd be amazing if every detail can be put into a game and still run smoothly. I am currently doing all my modeling on Maya. Maya has high poly count as it is.

ZBrush is widely used for modeling, but in a combination with a bigger pipeline.
Basically, with ZBrush you can sculpt artisticly without worrying about the topology, then come back later and retopologize the model allowing clean deformations, export into say XSI or Maya and animate

Blender = Time consuming, and therefore very expensive tho

Do you have a portfolio? or at least some screenshots of your work or models?

My reading on the topic is that by adopting its own UI and not following most of the conventions of the dominant Windows-derived UIs, Blender presents a significant training challenge. But I've only used it once, so what do I know?

Slightly related to the thread: I bought myself a copy of Carrara the other day because it gets excellent reviews, is Mac native (ish), was on special offer ($100 rather than $250) and the US's current extremely weak economy made that even cheaper for me as an international buyer. Plus it's supposed to be good for amateurs, like me. I'm still figuring it out though, so I don't have anything else like an interesting comment to make.

I think blender works fine as far as mouse input goes , it just takes some getting used to.
- SiegeLord -
If you're having trouble selecting something , use the b key , once for a box select and press b again to use a circle select. The box select works with a click drag and the circle select lets you use the mouse wheel to adjust the size of the circle and then you left click to select whatever is inside the circle. There's also a lasso select somewhere too. For most operations if you press the right mouse button , it cancels whatever you were doing.

With blender I haven't gotten quite as far as making an animation or exporting model data , but I've made some decent beginner models and terrain and started messing around with saving image renders.

I will say that the tabs are somewhat foreign though. It helps if I dock less often used tabs together.