I'd say it's not the same kind of basic. We still need people that know how to manually manage memory. We don't need them as much though. But at some point, Sun needs people to develop the JVM, and its memory management algorithm. The "how this works" is well documented in academic papers too.

Obviously, as you mention, the less there are people that are capable to do X, the more they cost. But it's not the same as "totally forgetting something".