The biggest misses in Live compared to Cubase
1) Native and easily configured dual monitor support with arrangement window on 1 screen and mixing windows on the 2nd.
2) Crossfading different audio clips on the arrangement window on the same track.
3) Off line processing - a huge plus when running a slightly older computer, you can process all your fx offline to save huge CPU cycles
4) MIDI editing - inline MIDI editing and more features, more synths configured out of the box to work right away.
5) Scoring - it might not come close to Sibelius, but MIDI scoring is fairly useful and better than what is offered in Sonar and Samplitude.
6) Ability to open 3 seperate resizeable mixer windows so much better when you have 20 or more tracks for mixing than Live's session view mixer
7) Folder tracks - although I never really used 'em much myself, they are useful, especially for helping to comp vocal takes.
greater file support - real media, ogg vorbis, mp3, broadcast wvave import and export etc.
9) Cubase 4 has improved synths and plugins - however, for the 350 dollars more Cubase 4 costs, you could buy some great 3rd party plugins to use in Live which would improve and probably surpass the cubase offerings.
10) It has support for playback/exporting 5.1 surround sound mixes, if your hardware supports it.
Some of this stuff can be worked around to some extent in Live and most of it are not features you would use everyday. If I had to choose one DAW, I would still choose Live, I hate composing music in Cubase's rigid linear environment.
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