If you want to do meshing within Max the best choice is Frost from Thinkbox imo. You can use Krakatoa in evaluation mode (without ever purchasing a license, they have left this functionality in for exactly this reason) to load some of the most common point cloud formats and use Frost to do the meshing. It's super-fast and very robust, I am using this all the time to produce 3d printable meshes from very complicated models. Krakatoa/Frost will read and process color information and display them nicely in the viewport. Rendering, however, is not possible without a license in Krakatoa (or only to a limited resolution, don't remember).
Modeling from point clouds is a completely different story. Since there's no point averaging for snapping or modeling in Max you pretty much have to eyeball everything you do. In the CAD market however, there are programs that specialize in automatic parametric modeling from point clouds and do a very good job mostly with some manual interaction, but their price tag is astronomic compared to the prices we're used to pay for DCC apps.
We use meshes from scans all the time for our work here as a guide but since these are very dense and inaccurate (like metaballs if you want) we re-model everything from scratch. Still, it would be absolutely impossible to get the level of accuracy and detail we need without the scans, so they prove to be extremely useful.