For what you pay, getting professional programs for creating music.
1. Professional sounding. If the music is not sounds, it's just a meaningless set of notes.
2. Professional audio processing. In any free program you will not find the equalizer with visualization of the frequency response in real time, for example.
3. Library of ready sounds and presets. They allow you to create music quickly. There is a difference - write a composition per week or two days. The first day you write it down, and the next day listen to what it needs fixing.
Under Windows I can recommend Fruity Loops or Cubase Steinberg. The first is good for creating electronic music, the other for more traditional genres.