what an interesting topic
Personally, I'm firmly in the Cakewalk stable and have been for some time.
My first PC sequencer was Cubasis back in the mid 90's... it was the lite version and was all I could afford (to spend on my hobby) at the time. I liked the ability to record a bit of MIDI and then split the clip and move it around etc. but I had big problems with the resulting MIDI recording stalling on playback. I found it difficult to get into the guts (events) of the MIDI messages and suss out what was going on.
Not long after getting Cubasis I decided that I needed a new sound card. At the time, Soundblaster were doing a card that had a daughter board that used the EMU chip. The other thing with this particular card was that it came bundled with Cakewalk Lite.
It was a totally different interface but was quite easy to pick up. But the greatest improvement in my opinion was the ability to open up an event window and "see" exactly what was going on "inside".
You might think this sounds a bit daft but what was happening with Cubasis was that each time you cut a clip up and cut and pasted the clips around it also copied additional program and contoller messages at the start of each new clip which is why the MIDI song would stall slightly as far too many messages were sent at the same time back to my MIDI device.
Cakewalk did not do that and even if it did you could open the event viewer and delete any spurious messages.
Sorry for recounting that rather long and boring tale but I wanted to try to explain why I ditched Cubasis and started using Cakewalk.
Since then I've stuck with Cakewalk and I have since upgraded to Sonar 5 Studio. It's a package that I am pretty comfortable with although I've also since started using the audio side more (was mainly a MIDI man previously).
I've seen Cubase in action but to be honest I'd prefer to stick with what I've got despite all the argued differences between the two packages.
Having said all that I must apologise for not being able to answer the original question...