Vegas can be used to create all kinds of effects. Where AE has the edge is comets, fireballs, shatters, canned stuff like that, that are hardly ever used, except for noobs, because everyone knows it's coming from AE.
Having said that, Vegas does not offer anything prebuilt except the usual cheesy transitions. So you will have to play with the tools and let your creativity flow.
The reason AE costs so much is that Adobe has to license all these effects from various vendors. Adobe doesn't actually make anything themselves, they aggregate other people's stuff. Like "Flash" VP6 .flv was licensed from a small little known company.
So don't be fooled by the high price, that it's "all that".
As an example of the two styles of the software, Vegas has a fractal generator that can be used to make clouds, lightning bolts, and whatever else you want to do. It doesn't specifically have a lightning effect plugin like AE.
Another example is a gradient fade. Vegas lets you bring your own gradient and will animate the fade from dark to light so the possibilities are limitless.
The Vegas toolset has things like Cookie Cutter, that simply uses standard circles, squares, rectangles, etc. as positive or negative masks. Again, unlimited possibilities.
In the video I posted there is a face of a jester winking. That jester is a photograph from the wall of a building in Venice, CA. I took the still into a graphics program and using a deform tool I created a still image sequence (animation), then brought it into Vegas as a video event. There is no "Make a face wink" plugin, therefore it is a unique effect that people haven't seen too much.
The main difference in Pro vs. MS is compositing tools and bezier masking. Vegas Pro supports all the major compositing operators. Again, these raw tools are limitled only by your imagination.
I better get off my soapbox, PDR's gonna hammer me here anytime soon
