Maya was always been about cramming the most amount of features to specific price. This was the main reason of its success.
Blender on the other hand is a free software, as such it does not have the amount of developers that Maya has to provide the quality and the amount of tools Maya provides but it has the freedom to decide to do thing that are not profitable like rewriting its GUI.
Till version 2.49 Blender had probably the worst GUI in the market but in version 2.5 GUI was rewritten fixing many of the flaws, and it went from last to second best , Softimage being the No 1.
Rewriting code is something companies rarely do as it is very expensive and it usually bring no increased sales to justify it from a commercial standpoint.
Bare in mind also that just because getting Blender costs nothing that does not mean if Blender decided to go commercial it would not have a similar price as Maya.
3d apps are expensive because they are insanely complex and it takes highly specialized coders to produce them. Also a professional artist wont care for the price if the tool helps him to be more productive as this will return him a profit in the long run far bigger than 4000.
The nice thing about Blender is that for us blender users and developers there is no such thing as “VS” , actually if you go to the blender forums you will rarely see blender being compared to other 3d apps, mainly because many of us have experience with using other 3d apps, and many also use Blender together with other apps.
Blender is far from perfect the same as Maya, but none the less in the end , the choice comes to personal taste.
For example I was a huge fan of Softimage, the moment Autodesk bought it , I knew its days were numbered so I went with
my second most favoriable software, Blender.
Choosing software is like choosing clothes really, there is some practical need, but in the end its just personal taste. Of course assuming you work alone and have the choice. Because if you work in a company the company will choose for you.
The good news is that Blender is becoming much better in supporting other 3d apps, so nowdays you can use Blender for everything.
The example you used is a simple case of a few seams and unwrap for blender , which should not take more than 30 secs. No idea why it would take you longer.
this is because 99% of the click in this video are not needed to unwrap the head. For example he uses the lasso tool to select half of the mesh and spends several clicks doing so, a box select would be far faster. He chooses edges one by one to mark seams when a ring select would have done that far faster.
The actually unwrapping , if you exclude all the pointless click and actions, took 10 sec if not less.