Right. He can partner with or hire one of the thousands of developers available out there.

They're all inundated with offers from the millions of "idea guys" out there. Idea guys a dime a kilo.

Right on. I went to a hackathon as a facilitator/judge type. There were 3 idea guys for every dev. The devs centered on some good ideas or brought their own. There were several idea guys that left feeling like their billion dollar idea was just missing a code monkey cog to slide into the code monkey cog slot to make it happen.

One of them had come up with oink aka foursquare aka yelp aka gowolla ...

Sad really.

Not sure I see your point - one of those thousands of developers out there can partner with or hire one of those thousands of him out there as well. There are lots of people who can program and lots of people who have ideas, and not so many people who can work together to technically execute ideas into profitable technology. Which is kind of the point the people you have been arguing with have been trying to make.

But there are far more people with ideas than people who can program. Programmers aren't in any way the commodities in this scenario.