Recently I have been following a lot of tutorials on hard surface modelling for software other than blender and from what I seen, maya seems to have the same tools as blender minus modifiers, I am yet to see a reason to use maya over blender for hard surface modelling other than nurbs modelling but in that case you should probably use fusion360 or plasticity or some other cad software. From what i know the only reason other than nurbs to use maya for hard surface modelling is just because that is what studios use, but in that case why would a studio use it. I know maya is probably better for characters and animation but can someone tell me the incentive maya has for hard surface modelling?
Because some people are simply used to this software or in their studio this is the recommended software (?)…
For personal use… if you have the money to “rent” this sofware… it’s just personal taste.
Of course there are thousend who tell you this or that dcc app is better suited… but in the end only you can decide 
(expect your employer wants you… 
)
I know but why would a studio use maya over max or some other software that has modifiers
Because they use a work pipeline where also other tools are involved… and so can not change from one day to another. Any 3D app is only one single tool in a bigger workflow and if there is an established workflow you can’t just change everything.
Ever heard of the mergening of to big companies. ? The merging of he workflow take years… expect if you close one and make everything like in the other… but even then new amount may be to much for the “old” system. But even this sometime takes years (or the company go bankrupt over this).
While individual users may be free to use the software transition, businesses do not. 
I would say that modelling is one of Blender’s greatest strengths, to the point it beats many paid options in this particular domain. I have used Maya in the past and I would say it isn’t anything special when it comes to modelling, but it’s strong on rigging and animation.
Other 3D softwares include their own modelling tools because they were made independently from each other and were each designed to allow for as much of the pipeline as possible on their own.
Even if each software has its strengths and weaknesses, I actually think it’s pretty neat that they each include every step, you can complete an entire project inside of a single app. Even if the tools in one app aren’t all optimal, it beats switching apps for every step and how tedious and buggy that would be. The advantage of having every tool bundled in a single package is something that shouldn’t be understated.
In fact, that is one of the main reasons why Blender is my main choice, it has a wide combination of features in a single package that no other 3D software has. As an example, Blender’s sculpting mode isn’t as powerful as Zbrush, but having it directly in the same app that does the modeling, texture and rendering is a great advantage that massively speeds up the process and opens doors for material creation (can’t mix procedural textures, mask painting and sculpting so easily when Zbrush doesn’t have your main app’s renderer).
But yeah, in a way you are right, unless something changed in the last few years, I would tend to place Blender’s modelling abilities above Maya’s.
As it already was mentioned: a lot of companies have an already established pipelines which involve maya. A lot of companies have some custom “in-house” tools written for maya. Theres no point to change this.
Personally i dont see any reason why maya can be good or special for hard surface.
I saw some cool nodeling tools in Cinema 4D as example, but not anything which catch my attention in maya.
The fun fact: maya doesnt have a “checker deselect” or “checker select” by default. Did it sound like a joke? For me personally - hell yeah! But its a harsh truth.
Only then you install some “modeling tools” which was written by autodesk and free for downloading you will get - “select n’th edge”, which still wouldnt be a “checker select/deselect” equivalent as in blender or 3ds max.
Of course there a lot of plugins which bring such functionality, but all of them are payed and its not even a question of price, its a question of “why maya doesnt have it by default?!”
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Like the other posts already mentioned, it’s a combination of things.
First of all, Maya has been out there for a long time (1998), and replaced the Softimage|3D (look up it’s VFX history) pipeline that studios had pretty quickly, with the advanced tools they were offering -at that point in time-.
Maya also replaced Alias (Power)Animator, but that’s another story.
Softimage XSI was released (another VFX history lesson) to combat Maya’s rise, but it was too late and too little. 
Lightwave 3D (VFX lesson 3) suffers/suffered the same fate, and should finally be shot behind the barn at this point…
So studios invested heavily in a pipeline that mostly revolved around Maya.
Other applications like Houdini, Filmbox Motion Capture (FBX), and some other tools completed the pipeline.
Integration and standards for adding a app into the pipeline are key. The better tools a 3d application has, the more likely it will be added. Blender is still very rough on the edges on that front imho.
Yes, there are other 3D applications out there, but most VFX studios still use Maya and/or Houdini these days. Also because there’s a lot of cross-collaboration and having the same software already shaves off tons of hours.
This is also seen in the slow and steady pace of adopting USD as a intermediate fileformat.
And yes, most applications can do more or less the same these days, with their own strengths and weaknesses. Unless your name is Houdini, and are a 300 pound gorilla that is also a 10th level wizard 
And historically things just went a certain way.
Maya/Houdini for VFX, 3DSMax for archviz, Lightwave evolved into Modo (sort of…), and tons of other 3d applications fell behind the cracks and became part 3d history. There’s so… so many of them…
Blender was there all the time, but not a serious candidate as a serious replacement. But now with computer hardware available for everyone, and not costing a house mortgage, things got a lot better.
Also, Blender got better after 2.8, and people noticed. With people like Ian Hubert or Daniel Bystedt showing what is possible nowadays.
For freelancers in certain areas of 3D work, Blender is the best solution imho.
It’s free, can do most of the work OOTB, or with addons/extensions. Which are also free or cost not that much.
And -for now- the community is still pretty nice and helpful. People who remember CGSociety and certain 3d forums know it can be a completely different ballgame… 
My long 0,10 cents on this.
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Maya is deeply procedural, every mesh operation is a node which can be reordered : bevel, loopcut, etc. are all nodes and can be edited after the fact. It doesn’t present them the same way Blender or Max does, but yes, Maya has “modifiers”. Not to mention now there’s the added flexibility of bifrost (=geonodes, more or less).
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Well, generally it’s about the big picture… It’s true that we tend to say “pick the best tool for the job”, but the best tool isn’t necessary the right tool !
When you start to use multiple software in a pipeline you should account for IO between software and sometimes data loss.
If I model with blender then it’s rigged and animated in maya, each time I need to modify the original model I’d probably loose some data, like weight paint for rigging stuff like that…
Also it depends on how much a task is central to your project. Zbrush is the best tool for sculpting, but say I’m using blender as my main tool and if I don’t have a lot of sculpt to do sticking to blender makes sense even if a sculpting task may take a bit longer than it should, it’s always possible to save some time another way and integrating zbrush in the pipeline might not be worth the effort…
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Because there’s more to full production than hard surface modeling. And often, it’s more desirable to have as many things as possible integrated into one software, than to have a couple extra features that requires using an entire second (or third) software.
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