Ok, havent talked to the Developer yet, but this much is from Ian:
"I know about the textures issue -and I've been looking for a solution for a long time. I've just downloaded Gmax in another attempt to see if I can find the textureand edit them - with no luck.
You wont get the textures up in Blender or any other nif tool.
I've literally installed dozens of programs trying to find the solution -and then unistalled them.
The textures are in there. A friend's Father has Maya and I think we got some of the models up on screen with the textures on after downloading a plugin from sourceforge but we didnt know how to extract or repaint them.
Maya is generally not an option though as Maya Complete costs $7,500 U.S. dollars to $1,999 and Maya Unlimited costs $16,000 to $7,500.
There is a free educational version of Maya but - it doesn't allow the NIF plugin to be installed."
So apparently, the textures are in the NIF itself.