Good question
The best answer that I can give you is that most good 3D packages pretty much accurately reproduce working with 3-view drawings, plus all of the obvious advantages of 3D. Rhino3D, which is my primary modeler, combines one of the most intuitive interfaces ever designed with a very friendly set of viewing controls. It's very much like drawing, with some sculpting thrown in.
There are other approaches to the "drawing in 3D" approach. I don't care for them, but others have built very nice work with them. These include Zbrush and Wings.
Zbrush is a program where brush strokes are transformed into 3D data. It's a very powerful tool for building very complex models, but isn't exactly user-friendly, and pretty much requires that you own a tablet.
Wings is a subdivision surface modeler, where... essentially, you make less into more. By taking simple primitives and carving and combining them and then subdividing them, you can use Wings to build all sorts of things.
I use Rhino3D, because ... while it's not *exactly* like drawing, it's very easy to use, and the interface makes it very easy to understand what's going on. That, and it's almost ridiculously powerful- things you simply cannot model in other software is usually a snap in Rhino. Plus it has all sorts of traditional CAD/CAM features, if you're seeking to model to a specific scale.