Spot on. The ascendence of the "data scientist" in the last few years is largely due to the proliferation of prepackaged, easy-to-use machine learning toolkits

Spot on. The ascendence of the "data scientist" in the last few years is largely due to the proliferation of prepackaged, easy-to-use machine learning toolkits like Weka/scikits-learn/RapidMiner/vowpal wabbit/libsvm that require little programming knowledge and only a superficial understanding of the actual algorithm. I actually think the easy availability of such toolkits is a good thing; for many applications, rigorous statistical knowledge is overkill. It's just unfortunate that these people call themselves data "scientists" when they commonly lack the years of training, journal publications, and expertise of actual scientists.