To summarize, OS X Default filesystem is HFS+ and you will want to use that for your main partitions. There are pieces of software out there that insist on being installed onto an HFS+ partition.
OS X will read NTFS. Won't write to it. Why? Most likely because of the security model... a Mac would need to be aware of the NT filesystem and permissions structure in order to effecitvely read and write to the disk. That is not easy to do, as how would a Mac predict both NT Workstation and Domain permissions when it is not "active"?
What I would do is get your mac, and then setup a small network to offload the data onto a different disk drive, or to CD-ROM / DVD Rom. Then again, if this is your only copy of the data, you do realize you are begging for hard disk failure and the collapse of it all.