I don't think that knowledge of low-level systems programming is ever going away. The order in which we learn it is merely changing. In the past, everyone had to understand the absolute basics first because the higher level abstractions were very leaky. Over time the abstractions have gotten better, performance has become less of a problem for most cases, and low-level systems are no longer something everybody needs to know in order to get by at the higher layers of abstraction.

However, that doesn't mean that people aren't learning it anymore. They're just starting with a broad set of high-level knowledge and drilling down into the parts that are important to them. For instance, recently I've been toying with compact string representations of big integers (using bit shifting: how topical).

The end result is that you end up with developers who have broad knowledge of the higher layers of abstraction but incomplete and specialized knowledge of the lower layers. That seems perfect to me.