Were the hot chicks on the box just to get people to pick it up and look at it or did they actually have anything else to do with the game?

I would say: Marketing Ploy.
But then, they missed/skipped the option to have the 'X' in redux a much higher font size just to sell it that little bit more.

well they mention war, trains & racing and the women in question are clothed in a way that hints at it (if you notice the clothes that is)
I'd give them multiple flippers...

They play an extremely important role in the game... as a briefly displayed transition screen that is shown right after the company logo and before each table is loaded. ;)

yeah their not in the game just in loading and such

Pure Pinball 2 requires a T&L ADAPTER; i anint got one .
Anyone know of a work around.

Sorry, toothless2, but I'd say you're out of luck. Pure Pinball uses hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to generate the table in real-time, and if it needs a 3D card with hardware T&L, it's not likely that you'll be able to get around that.
I would suggest that you check out the Pro Pinball series, but the versions here at GOG run within the DOS Box emulator, and I suspect that if your video card is too old for Pure Pinball, then you likely also don't have a CPU fast enough for DOS Box to run the Pro Pinball games well.
If you're technically savvy enough, you should see if you can find a DOS demo of Pro Pinball: Timeshock and install it on your machine using the latest version of DOS Box, and see how that works out. You'll be extremely hard-pressed to find a better pinball simulation than Timeshock, so if it happens to run smoothly then I wouldn't spend much more time worrying about Pure Pinball.
EDIT:
As it eventuated, only Timeshock was released here as a DOS game. GOG's versions of Big Race USA and Fantastic Journey are both Windows-native, and so should run beautifully.
FWIW, Timeshock is my favourite, followed by Fantastic Journey, and lastly Big Race USA.