Texturing in 3DSMax and Maya isn't difficult but has quite the learning curve, if you're texturing a simple thing all you need to do is pick a texture and use one of the default projections(plane,cube,etc), advanced texturing demands the creation of wraps.

(I even failed at texturing a slice of bread in blender...)

Heh, I find Blender completely unfathomable.

Funny thing... I almost NEVER do any texturing in Maya, I just make things incredibly detailed and use shaders. It takes up a lot of precessing power but it's not too bad, at least it's easy and uses very little memory, and with good LoD you can have as little geometry as possible.
Which reminds me... "tessellation" being used in games these days is retarded, they're doing it BACKWARDS; it should be used for LoD, detailed models simplified at range so you never have more polys than you can see, also GPU culling.