Softimage is an amazingly intuitive, fast modeller. And it is very stable now, which is a critical thing. They upgraded one year and the main purpose of the upgrade was to address stability issues. I think that was the 6.5 release. 3dsmax and Maya are not exactly unusable modelling apps, either.

Softimage is fully mature at model + texture + render, and irreplaceable. I would consider it impossible to remake. I'm not sure anyone should even try. Should Houdini attempt it? I don't know. It will be a big uphill battle to piecemeal features from Softimage into an effects app like Houdini. I'm not sure that's a good use of their resources, given the competition. I can find 5-7 apps to model in, including Softimage, since it can be installed and left for years… the modelling aspects are complete.

Another main benefit to Softimage is scene and instance management, and how instances interact with the material editor. There is a certain simplicity to Softimage that is unmatched. It is extremely easy to build unbelievably complex scenes based on instanced assets, and manage and render the scene with no issues.

Autodesk is killing one of the best 3D applications ever created. It is unreal to see this happen.