Personally, my family found it useful while living in France, where having copies of your medical records are your responsibility. For someone like myself that saw the doctor 1 or 2 times a year, it was convenient to go back to him and say, yah, last time we tried these two medicines for my cold, and this one worked, can you prescribe this one, etc. Nothing complicated, but it helped to make a bit of a closed loop on the treatment history if I was actively involved in the treatment history. Just my experience.

Having worked in Silicon Valley and in Europe I have lived through some great battles of Verilog vs VHDL. Even had an engineer reminding me just lack week why VHDL is better. The reason he though it better was because it would not have allowed a port size mismatch that lead to some strange waveforms when the Logic Analyzer was configured the way he imagined it should be. None the less, Verilog is used for more ASIC designs then VHDL. (Simply ask the tool vendors Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor.)

For me Verilog is closer to describing HW and allows an engineer to do what they want. It is like a sports-bike. It will get you there very fast and you can cut a lot of corners. But, watch out or you will be in a ditch pretty quick.

For students, it is most important that they learn HW design before learning Verilog or VHDL. They need to understand the parallel nature of HW, and should be familiar with state machines and Karnaugh map reductions. In general they should not be writing shifters with for loops. Both languages allow you to describe HW that looks OK in simulation and has a whole host of problems after synthesis. I would teach Verilog because the language will not force good design and the students will be forced to learn when their FPGAs have problems. VHDL, on the other hand, will provided training wheels that allows the user to not truly understand what they are doing and still pass the class.