In my opinion, the skin works very well for a "peasant" tauren, but considering he's an adventurer, I'd suggest you give him a more grungy look by adding in some wear lines or showing some smudges by using the burn tool. That'd make the character look like a new guy in the sense he's kinda poor, but not squeaky clean brand new. I guess it depends on the story behind your character more than my opinion thougn.
About what model to use: If you use the regular tauren model it needs to look like it's holding something, like a villager carrying goods to sell at the fair. If you want to use a more versatile model, I'd suggest (like the above posters) basing the skin off of the razormane cheiftain or tauren chieftain hero to get a good weapon swing animation or, if you can pull it off, an edited doomguard. The doomguard has the cool spell animation and an already tauren-like shape, and you just need to change the skin, armor, and wings, but the quilboar has a better premade mane style and the tauren chieftain already looks like a tauren! X^D