Software used for high end and production animation is mostly made in house, like Lucasfilm or Pixar, or Disney.... Most other high end productions are done with Maya, Softimage/XSI, and to a lesser degree, Side Fx Houdini (and rarely, Electric Image Animation System). For 2D animation, one uses US animation, Animo etc...
Hardware for top notch productions is SGI based, mostly on the Mips range of processors with SGI graphics. On the middle level to low level platform, you have Dual and single processor Xeons or (now) Athlons and loads of RAM and very fast graphics cards like the 3D labs range, or the FireGl range or now, the Nvidia Quadro range of cards (GeForces are not much slower though
)
The hard disks are mostly SCSI, but with ATA100 now, I think one can make do with goodly speed.
Frame rendering depends on the equipment and/or the scene complexity as well as the type of rendering being used (i.e if you use raytracing or radiosity based rendering, it increases rendering time significantly)
Number of systems can depend on the complexity of the project and the manpower involved. For EPISODE1, over 200 SGI workstations were used full time (50 TB of data passed in a single day between the network!!!)
The technology we're referring to is already here, but it is on a much lower scale.....for example, you can't expect a card that gives great frame rates in Q3 (about 10000 poly's per frame max, to handle 5,00,000 poly's in real time.....I think it is going to take a long time to accomplish)
FF was done in maya, but one thing you should know is that most of the texturing was done by hand!!! (almost always, in most productions, the best work is hand painted)
(btw, cray is dead, and your athlon and Geforce is more powerful than the 5 year old cray
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