Layer passes are a step in the right direction, but Beauty, Color, and Shadow are the available passes, which leaves out more specific or detailed passes. Many high-end visual effects and animation shops animate in Maya and use Pixar's RenderMan to produce final renders. But for a solution of this caliber, users are very demanding of their rendering engines. The IPR in Maya is a powerful feature that allows you to see a fully rendered version of a scene or a section thereof before committing to a final render. As its name suggests, the renders happen interactively while you're making adjustments to textures or lights.
Performance can be sluggish depending on the complexity of the scene.
Docs The learning curve with Maya can be steep, but the Learning Maya tutorial book that comes with the application is first-rate. In addition, the exhaustive documentation, although intimidating, is extremely helpful when dealing with the little quirks inherent in an application as deep as Maya. There are also a number of very good books covering the application, although none have been updated for v3 as of yet. For most artists, comprehension of the basic way that Maya works and the analogies it uses is sufficient to get them going. User interaction with the interface can be very sluggish at times, and as with most high-end applications, a very powerful system is required to take full advantage of Maya.