Why do computers exist, and why do people study them? Because they're very useful for "practical concerns". Practical concerns should be at the heart of any study of computers and computation; it's impractical for them not to be.
I'd rather teach a new hire who had worked through a curriculum built around SICP[1] or HtDP[2] the languages and technologies we actually use here -- even though we never write a line of scheme -- then teach a student who got a four year `Computer Science' education focused on the details of a particular programming language or technology stack how to use that very stack to accomplish lasting things...
I am finding many "high-church-of-X" approaches to CS increasingly unsatisfying, whether it's rabid OO, the rabid 'functional programming solves all problems', Stephanov's 'grind away for 6-12 months putting the basics on a RIGOROUS FOUNDATION without solving a single interesting problem' book, etc...
My feeling is that many of these religious attitudes will not survive the first contact with a truly serious enemy - in other words, a system with substantial complexity that can't be expressed in an elegant way. I don't think it's a mistake that strong FP guys spend so much time hacking around on compilers, type systems, regular expressions, etc. Maybe a foray into scientific computing - but if you're biting off problems that were previously tackled by a bunch of nested loops in HPF, maybe these aren't the world's most hairy algorithms either.