There are some nice GUI tools for Windows and Mac that handle CVS and SVN interaction. Your designer may not like it, but the downside of not doing it is pretty clear: your app will not work with the wrong version of the templates.
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In particular Tortoise(CVS|SVN) are very usable Explorer integration programs. Nice little colored blobs on each file/folder icon to indicate the status and a right-click menu to do stuff.
If they never used version control before, of course there is a slight threshold, but these tools are nice once you get the hang of that.