I'm did not understand this line, could you tell me more about it please ? If you agree ^^
Pix, gDebugger etc. are tools for debugging graphical problems. They allow you to record an entire frame (or multiple frames) and look at what's going on, step by step. They also allow you to "inspect" all the resources, including vertex buffers, index buffers and textures. And they usually also include the nice feature, that you can export/save them from the trace. So just by uploading your textures into the rendering API, you pass it to Pix/gDebugger and they expose methods for saving it back to disk.
Pretty much the same applies for all APIs, even if the tools might not be as easily available. If for example you pass a soundeffect to your audio library, which happens to be a DLL, a programmer can write a wrapper around that DLL which intercepts the data.
Dumb people won't try. Smart people will look at the files no matter what you do.
This! Most people aren't really that interested in UV unwrapped textures. But those that are, and like to look at them at a regular basis, also know how to use Pix/gDebugger to do so.
Besides, everyone who plays the game will (hopefully) look at the textures anyway, inside the game. What "damage" do you expect to arise from people also looking at them outside the game?
