Does it help with loading times/textures? A friend of mine told me the textures looked better if you installed it to the hard drive.

Pc or xbox?

Never mind. Im in the wrong section.
I hear it makes it worse.

... Xbox, isn't this the Xbox subforum?

The conventional wisdom on the forums is that installing makes it worse. This is acknowledged by Bethesda, who have posted about it and mentioned that this will be addressed in the next patch (see the top of this forum).

I installed mine on day1 and didn't notice much of a problem, but after hearing about this potential problem I decided to uninstall and clear the system cache and run off the disk to see if I was missing anything. I didn't really find a change in load times, since they were pretty fast either way, and the textures looked about the same for the most part, here and there certain textures looked slightly better. What I did notice was that after a day or so there started to be a good bit of popup of more distant objects and some intricate textures (half a second or so), and a little bit of stuttering/jagginess when panning certain areas really fast, none of which were happening when I was running the game off the disk.
What I plan to do is, first, re-clear the cache and reinstall the 1st patch and see if the problems stop, and if that doesn't work I'm gonna reinstall the game to my hdd, since it seems like there were less problems before.

All this said, the issues are pretty mild and (fingers crossed) so far I haven't run across any major glitches, so I'm having fun.

I would say this- playing off the disk heats up the xbox more than running the game installed so if you plan on playing the game for long stretches at a time (as most players seem to do with Skyrim, myself included), think about installing it, just to see if it looks ok since it'll be better for your xbox overall.

I play with it installed, while i do suffer from a lot of crappy texture's i dont mind them since they will be fixed eventually, the main reasons why it's safer to install the game especially if playing for long periods of time (as mentioned in the above post) is that i massively reduce the risk of my xbox overheating or burning out my disc drive.

The texture problem's happen off disc too although not as bad as installed but for the above reason's i mentioned it's probably a lot better to install it, i mean this time next week we should have the 1.2 patch.