Specifically, Max unifies (many) editing operations on the modifier stack. An object is the result of a sequence of operations on meshes/paths/patches/etc, from a root creation facility.
In Max you can take a torus, say, apply materials, move it about, distort the mesh, apply physics settings, and then go back to the first modifier and change the torus' inner radius.
In Blender, although you can parametrically create a torus with the same options as in Max and customize those settings immediately afterwards, once you edit the created mesh in any way - or even just select another object - you can't edit those settings any more: it becomes "just a mesh".
Max has mesh editing as a stage in the modifier stack (it also has Blender-style "real" mesh editing). You can layer multiple mesh edits on top of each other and toggle each off or whatever you like. Blender can do the same thing, but as shape keys. Both applications can make the same edits to a mesh, but in Blender they can't apply at different points in the modifier stack: they're all effectively applied before all the actual modifiers.