Short answer: yes. There is at least one way to get around this. You could put all the information that JACAL needs for the first stage on a hard drive, and then use JACAL to do installations on different partitions or on a different hard drive in the same computer. The application information could still be stored on the network.
The reason JACAL needs NFS is that the kernel on the bootdisk mounts its root partition from an NFS server.