Well... I use ableton as a great big sampler and route reason through it because you can't do it the other way round. Plus you can (and I really should do this more) record segments of beats, bass, melody and play them in Live DJ style, and you can get very good musical results that way.
And I have to say to my ears Live sounds very good when you render it out. Rewired tracks aren't being warped, so you don't have that sound degradation issue.
Plus, the tools it has really aren't bad. the 8-way eq is pretty good- I'm beginning to prefer it to Logic's - and the compressors from 7 onwards are OK, and they have a side chain input, which can be very useful. Though TBH I'm finding that I am taking off compression a lot of the time these days, you're better off balancing levels and changing sounds (or the octave of the notes) rather than trying to eq and compress things so they fit.
Above all, Live is FUN. Logic and Cubase promise much, but in the end, they aren't that much fun to use. And having fun means you make much better music, more quickly. But people say Sonar is fun too! And Loefah and Oris Jay absolutely swear by Logic and think that's fun. I'm actually going to buy Logic soon anyway - it's addictive enough for me to want a version that's stable (the crack that's out there is the very first v8 and is not that stable).
Download the demo of Live off the site and see what you think, it's bum easy to use. I think there's a demo of Sonar too.