Programming yes (, Multimedia yes (audio, video, photoshop etc)
The combination, no. Webdevelopment is pretty much the only kind of programming where you're expected to make things look fancy. In Java/C++/C# etc you just stick to the/a framework. If a fancy design is required they'll stick a designer on it.
With Qt4 (usable with a fuckload of different programming languages and de facto standard more or less for C++) CSS knowledge can come in quite handy though.
In theory you could do webdevelopment without knowing any HTML as well (think for example C#/.net where you can use all the standard elements and have no clue of what exactly is outputted to the browser). Doubt any form of education would find that to be a good idea, it's their job to teach you the basics and if you don't know the basic markup of a HTML page they failed to do so.
@Windows 8/HTML5. Using the currently common languages (C# and C++ I think for Windows development?) still has advantages. As anyone having worked with javascript knows it works great for the web but as soon as you start doing very big/complicated stuff you'd be better off with something else. There is no IDE for javascript (or any weakly typed language) that comes even close to offering as much support as for example Visual Studio does when working with C#.
Did you see how often I mentioned C# so far? That's how much I hate VB ;)
I think it's mainly a move they're making for the added ARM support. They're seeing a future on the tablet market for Windows 8. If they make it easy to port 'apps' from other platforms (where HTML5 is becoming more and more common) than they're increasing their own chances at success.