I agree with the point you make with Normalisation, but I think it's important that they teach that from the start - because it has so many advantages during initial design (especially from a modeling perspective) that we should all understand those fundamentals.

Once you have the normalized model, then you can 'de-normalize' as needed to attain performance/scale needs, and that usually does happen, I would agree.

With respect to data warehouses and olap type databases, we usually look at dimensional models which don't necessarily fall under the same normalisation rules. They didn't really have those models when I was in school - I'd be interested to know if they teach dimensional modeling in typical universities these days, or if you have to be in an advanced curriculum to hit those topics.