hello, yep you can make smart enough materials such as here Laser Rifle Work in Progress to create decent procedural textures akind subtance designer, which you can indefinitely edit, and if needed bake into a image textures…and most importantly for some not uvs needed at all for procedural :D…
And for the z brush vs blender… zbrush still rules in what is the cared featured that is sculpting performance, you can sculpt millions of poly count “smoothly” (i dont know if its really good working in a decent mid end pc, i havent been able to test it myself), in the other hand in the blender you can millions of polygons in a scene, but the issue is that is sluggish, and awful performance for extreme high polycounts, for navigating,animation playing, sculpting, and edit mode as well… with the blender you have the necessary tools to sculpt properly organic stuff, but maybe not as advanced or with same brushes as zbrush has available…the biggest cons and pros here is obviously the price of the software 
fortunately blender will be free forever, meanwhile zbrush not and hopefully blender in next years/months is gonna really be a decent competitor with zbrush,3d coat,mudbox, and etc… here a recent example of a possible million polygon sculpt Portraits of Simon
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