Dean,
Thanks for the quick tour! I found it quite interesting really. It looks on the face of it that you have most of the same controls in there to do stuff with, it's just buried under a lot of presets. I think they are just assuming that most of the people using it are not digital artists but engineers. It seems like it's quite a good renderer as well. If you can define texture slots or edit the presets and save them as something else, I would say you have most of what you need there. The big bug-bear is going to be UV mapping, which is unwrapping models to send over to Photoshop for texturing. I saw a tab for it, but it depends on how many tools you have to do that with. UV mapping tends to be a PitA.
Blender's renderer is kind of out-dated (it can't do light bounces, colour bleeding or caustics). It's currently in the middle of a re-vamp, and looks pretty promising, but its at a pretty alpha stage right now. The basic texture slots work like this. You can define a basic material type, based on various material types. They tend to be be pretty basic, and then you have the ability to change it's transparency and shininess. Most of your 'materialness' is defined by several 'slots'.
Diffuse, which is the basic colour coat.
Bump/Normal - The bumpiness of a material. The grain in wood, the graininess in cast iron, all that stuff.
Specular - The shininess of a material.
Transparency - how see-through a material is.
Blender doesn't come with any pre-sets, but it does have a range of good generic patterns that can be used to overlay on top of each other. Using transparency, bump and specular, and also using different textures to amplify and subtract from each other, you can get some amazing effects from Blender's simple procedural textures. It tends to take a lot of fiddling, though, and I tend to prefer to use photo-sourced textures and create my different maps that way. I find it faster and more realistic in the long run.
I use
Yafaray, which is a free open-source raytracer. It's relatively fast and sits as a plug-in in Blender so it behaves as though it was part of Blender. You can get fast and dirty 'direct lighting' renders and you can use either Path Tracing or Photon Mapping for photo-real rendering (but be prepared to wait a few hours). Recently I've been investigating
LuxRender, which is another free renderer. It's 'physically accurate' which means it looks photo-real, but as it calculates EVERYTHING, it can take forever (36 hours!!!!) to render a picture. Recently though, they've got GPU acceleration on board and the situation has greatly improved to where it's pretty much usable as a standard renderer.
Owen