It's very true, there's no way around UV mapping in a lot of the time so it is an important point to make and something you need to learn as well with time. Even in the case of Maya's procedural textures it's only with the 3d procedurals you can get away from this. My take on it is simply that in terms of something like an interior, you're a lot better of using shaders as you'll be able to generate good materials quickly and with things like the mental ray architectural materials and image based lighting you can get some great results.

Another strenght of procedurals over bitmapped textures is that they will not pixelate when you zoom in on them and if you're going for a close up photorealistic shot this is of great importance. If you're making your own color map in Photoshop, you can of course set the resolution really high to reduce this effect, I'm painting a high res map for the spitfire at the moment. The problem with that I've noticed is that when you're rendering with these kind of high res maps and you have something like physical sky and sun in addition to this your render times start to run incredibly high when it takes a lot more processing power to calculate one of these high res maps. As procedurals are calculated differently than bitmaps, you also have the advantage that you'll get random patterns and avoid repetitions in your textures whithout having to start shuffling UV's which can be a bit tricky to get right.

In the end of the day, you will need to map your textures to a surface material, and even if you have a great color map it won't come out nice unless you understand how to work with the material it's actually on as this should be in control of specular highlights and reflections that will appear on the surface which is what will determine the level of realism in terms of your lighting. For this reason, I think the best route to take is to learn to understand materials first, then the textures themselves.

There is very little focus on surface materials in a lot of tutorials you find online which is a shame because they are crucial to get any kind of good lighting to work. I spend a lot of time looking at gallery images and demo reels and I've noticed that a lot of people only use the material as a route to get their bitmaps on to a model, and then completely ignore the rest. I think this happens because you start in the UV and texturing end of things, and when you put a color and bump map on a grey Blinn and this completely changes what it looks like the material itself doesn't seem to be that important anymore. I've also seen people lay out all the UV's for huge metallic surfaces, only to texture paint it in a uniform color and apply that as a color map, when you would have had a better result done in two seconds by giving it a metallic paint shader.

Another thing with the procedurals is that the names are quite misleading, for example you might put a water texture on a plane render it and find that this doesn't look like water at all and based on this assume that they're just there as basic default textures but that you should always take the time to make your own bitmaps if you can. I've heard from people in the past. The thing with these textures are that a lot of time you use them for pretty much the opposite of what they say, in the case of water I use this one to create sand dune patters, which it is a lot better for than making actual water.

That said, you can't use shaders and procedurals for absolutely everything so texture painting and UV's are important as well. I just wouldn't start in this end, especially not with something like an interior scene, but it comes down to who you are and what you enjoy.

@Jay: In your case being a great modeler I can see why UV's are not that bad, but for someone like me who detests modeling the UV mapping is a bit like going through the whole painful process again Dave told me about your lighting tutorial btw, it sounds interesting so I look forward to watching it. He's here in the background laughing saying that the only reason for why I'm writing these marathon forum posts is because I'm trying to get myself out of recording the final parts of my video.

@boyze: I looked at the scenes again and you should be fine just learning how to use basic light types and materials, and actually not need to light it up as a whole room. You can just point spots at it with 3 point lighting. We have a tutorial on this in the free section. I also made a basic lighting tutorial a few months back which you can find in the lighting section on the site, it's cheaper than most other things out there and it would teach you everything you'd need to know in terms of those scenes to get some quick results. Or read the Maya help files, they have a lot of basics covered as well, but the language is technical, so it can be a bit of a mouthfull. Just a tip for the future if you're ever lighting up a room remember that you need all four walls and a roof as well, it's easy to delete one wall and not think about this.