See that David Turfitt whisky bottle in another thread about labels with thickness :) That's all C4D and totally on a par with anything from Max (well, actually it's the best bottle renderings from any tool that I've seen, but there is some archviz work with Corona from Max that lives up to similarly awesome quality).
There are indeed many more Max users, and they often have much longer careers in 3D, so that would be the cause of any apparent "difference in quality".