There really isn’t, unfortunately. If you hold the J key down while grabbing the arrow, you’ll enable discrete transform which is vaguely like increment snapping in Blender. (you can adjust the interval in the tool option panel). You can also just change transform values by hand. If you want to make a copy of an item with a fixed offset, you can use the duplicate-special function for that. (Edit > Duplicate Special, or <shift>+<cntl/cmd>+D)
Blender’s poly modeling tools are way better than Maya. UVs are more a mixed bag, especially in newer versions where Maya has gotten some nice UV tools like unfold and the ability to jump a UV shell between UV tiles. For poly modeling though, it’s not even close. It’s less Blender’s tool are amazing (though they’re pretty good) and more that Maya’s are just crap. The basics are all there, but a lot of the more esoteric and corner-case tools just aren’t. There are also some very senseless behaviors that just seem like sloppy design, like bevel deselecting all faces when run.
Some stuff that is better in Maya:
-Rigging is way more flexible, if a bit messier as a consequence. Maya can do cool shit that Blender’s system just doesn’t allow for, like piping constraint outputs into a shader. Pretty much any value or output in Maya can be connected to any other value or output. Oh, and there’s a muscle system.
-ALL the commercial plugins! (or most of them anyway). Speaking of plugins, sign up for the free version of PRman when it comes out, or see if your school can get a student license of Arnold or Vray. Because Mental Ray is a piece of shit, and you will soon come to loathe it.
-References are glorious. Unlike in Blender where linked assets are always locked, Maya lets you add extra operations and properties to linked files, and these are re-ran when the file is reloaded. Referencing does give you enough rope to hang yourself with though, it might take some experience to understand how it works and what sorts of edits and source file changes you can get away with.
-Render layers. Instead of using a handful of property overrides (per-layer property settings), you can just arbitrarily override any prop you want. Material assignments, shader colors, texture connections, light brightness, object visibility, rendering flags, poses, locations, whatever.
As for learning it, it’s just something that will take time. It took me probably 6 months of using it daily before I really felt as comfortable in Maya as I do in Blender. For some general tips, try and get used to using marking menus, they’ll cut down on all the mouse clicks you need in Maya (which can be a lot). For example, shift-right-click will bring up a menu with modeling functions like extrude, loop cut, etc. Holding Q and clicking will bring up options for the selection tool (hotkey Q). Same thing with the W/E/R (the transform tools).
And no, the “complete tool” function doesn’t really do anything useful, at least not for artists calling it manually. No one really knows why it is located in such a prominent menu. Btw, if you find you get the select-all/complete-tool menu instead of the vert/edge/face menu (a common annoyance with new Maya users) it’s because you clicked on a blank area of the viewport instead of an element of your mesh.