> The practical benefit of FIPS 140 is less that your crypto is better and more that your systems will fail to establish connections with anything not using FIPS mode, thus reducing your threat exposure.
No, I don't think so.
If I'm running, say, a TLS listener (an HTTPS web server), there is no way for you to tell if I'm using a FIPS-validated implementation of the algorithms or not. I can be using a cipher suite that is allowed by FIPS, but that doesn't mean my implementation is FIPS-validated. It's not like there's a "FIPS validated and FIPS mode enabled" flag added to the TLS spec, and even if there was, there'd be nothing stopping me from setting it to true even when using a non-validated implementation.