It’s so far above and beyond Maya it isn’t funny. The workflow alone makes Houdini worth using, and makes going back to anything else feel like a major downgrade.
As far as ART goes, Houdini ships with a more powerful, more flexible and frankly easier to use auto rigger than ART.
Oh yeah you can also load the core of Houdini as a plugin into Maya, and soon Unreal Engine 4 so you can directly work with procedural assets inside the game engine. This makes Houdini far more than just a content creation program, but also a tools platform. It will be interesting to see what kind of interoperation will be possible between Blueprint and Houdini Engine.
While that video is shows Houdini Engine working in Unity, but it’s on it’s way to UE4 as well.