According to Torley, the gray with white outline surfaces that one sees while waiting for textures to load is not itself a texture but is created using something along the lines of a OpenGL polygon file operation (something more or less like that).
I suggest that a field be added to prims to allow builders to set the color that would be used where we see gray now. This would take three bytes per prim to store a normal RGB color value. This would allow a brown tree to have a brown loading texture, a brick wall to have a dark red loading texture, etc.