I did a little digging up. There is a team at NIFTools who create the model tools, but I hear that release reliability is somewhat low. However, they have updated NIFSkope to work with Skyrim's model formats. I tried it out and it does work in addition to running better than the previous version I was on. It is a Release Candidate though, not a finished version, so expect bugs. The current (as of this post) version up there is
1.1.0-RC4, or you can check the entire
Sourceforge listing for previous versions and other tools. Here's a screencap of that statue I uploaded to show that it works.
As far as modeling program tools, the dating on Sourceforge shows that the Blender and 3DS Max plugins haven't been updated since 2010, and Maya since 2009. It's safe to say that it may be a while before we export models directly into Skyrim, though there may be some workaround that I haven't checked with NIFSkope. I don't know if there are any other sites that they keep updated more often, but given that they are updating recently on Sourceforge, I can only assume that what you see there is all they have to give.
I also checked on NVidia's
official DDS plugin for Adobe Photoshop and I am pleased to see that they've updated it and now support x64 versions of Photoshop. I checked it and it works, so I no longer need to boot into x86 in order to work with textures. I'd imagine that the old version of the plugin would still work because the format itself hasn't changed, but it never hurts to be up-to-date. The save dialog looks much the same.
If you want to learn any more, I think the next best course of action would be to contact the NIFTools team directly to get the details on the format plugins for our favorite modeling programs. I'm sure they're still working on it, but it'd be nice to have more sources to go on than speculation. Barring that, you could also just spend enough time browsing the Skyrim Mods forum to see if someone asked a similar question and if it was answered.
Once we get the Creation Kit in a few weeks, the NIF plugins are all that we will need to begin full development.
Also, it might be a good idea to look around and see if there is any sort of NIF converter that can work between Oblivion and Skyrim. You shouldn't convert official assets with it, but it might be a good idea to carry over all of the Silgrad Oblivion data that we can utilize.