Darkvision is, apart from being black and white (presumably, greyscale is what they mean, because vision in exactly two shades is very different to how creatures see things in the daytime), "like normal sight". But the way we see things is dependent on where light sources, what kind of light they shed, are and how shadows are cast by that light.
So would, for example, an apple on a table look completely different to a human as to a dwarf, so that you could immediately tell if a painting of the apple was done by a human (there's a shadow of the apple opposite the light source, which looks like the color of the table but darker) versus a dwarf (the apple either doesn't cast a shadow, or the shadow has less color because the dwarf sees the shadowy area in black and white)?
(I know there's an answer to a similar concern in 5e rules, but that edition's darkvision treats darkness as dim light, which seems pretty different from how the generally less-abstracted 3.5e describes it)