Most of the toxic chemicals aren't actually found in the tobacco in its natural state (some are but most are not). The majority of the "baddies" come from the combustion of the organic material. In principal, when something is thoroughly burned it releases free oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen as all of the bonds are broken from the incredibly high energy, and leaves pure carbon (ash) behind. However, the burning is not complete when smoking because the temperature simply doesn't get high enough for complete oxidation, which leaves you with a bunch of random particles, often things like benzene (which is part of the chemical structure of many non-harmful organics) which has a solid ring structure that requires quite a bit of energy to break, are formed during incomplete combustion, turning a non-harmful organic molecule into a potent carcinogen (benzene). Of course, there are plenty of things that can deteriorate your health naturally found in the plant, but you get the idea. The reason why (in theory) none of the baddies are supposed to be found in the isolated nicotine, is that by taking advantage of the natural bonding tendencies and solubility properties of nicotine, one can separate it from the rest of the organic material pretty thoroughly. However, even pharmaceutical grade nicotine found in nicotine gum and such is not 100% pure, and still contains some traces of the original plant materials from the tobacco. The point is to get it as pure as possible, to the point where the impurities are of a negligible amount. As all commercial nicotine comes from tobacco, it will never be 100% pure, so if someone tells you their liquid has 0 of the tobacco baddies in it, make a mental note that that person is full of **** and probably doesn't know what they are talking about. Also bear in mind that the flavorings used in many of the liquids are quite possibly more harmful than the residual tobacco chemicals (we don't know because they don't tell us what's in it).
And no taz some evil man doesn't pour benzene on his product just to **** with you, smoking any plant material leads to inhaling dangerous chemicals, they actually do try to make it safer.