Non-CG still uses a shader file, that in many ways might be more complicated to use.
Every game today, or even in the past, needed some kind of system to set up shaders. I remember setting up shaders before my M3 release and that was umm, 6 years ago now... so it's not a 'new' thing to have to do.
Before that in Racer you would set up shaders in essence, via the DOF properties in Modeller.exe, by setting ambient/diffuse/specular/reflect properties etc... so once again there was some work to do it well.
In theory, the new CG shaders, once matured a bit more, should make content creation much easier than it has been for a long time considering the quality you get back!
Dave