Hadley Wickham, Andrew Gelman, and maybe Pete Warden are who data scientists look up to, but I think Nate Silver is the first data scientist to be a household name (admittedly, NYT-reading upper middle class households, but still).
Gelman, Tufte and Wickham are in the pantheon, sometimes followed by dataviz fellows like Cairo.
Never heard of Warden.
Silver would likely be described as a 'data journalist' rather than (or at least as often as) a data scientist.