I don't really think the physical approach is any more concrete than Scott Aaronson's approach (at least in the way most people talk about concreteness wrt peda

I don't really think the physical approach is any more concrete than Scott Aaronson's approach (at least in the way most people talk about concreteness wrt pedagogy). The point of having examples is to illustrate how general principles work in practice by specializing. You can do this just fine in quantum information/computation by discussing particular algorithms, problems, etc. Frankly having taken both QC courses and QM courses, I found the physics-oriented exposition used a bunch of verbiage to phrase things in an experimental/physical way without really specializing the mathematical objects in any sense (eg, Stern-Gerlach experiments). That particular sort of concreteness can be helpful in other parts of physics, but physical intuition is weak to nonexistent in QM. Anyway, I'm nowhere near a physicist so take my review with a grain of salt.