Are you saying that in Korea one can be a CS major and have never done a single SW project in any language? Sorry, I find that hard to believe.

One of my friend didn't submit his project for Operating System course, still got an A-. He doesn't know anything about seg fault handling or process scheduling. How did he get an A-? Because companies are looking for good GPAs rather than what actually the candidate knows. Students complain if they get low grades because it may screw up his career. Since universities are competing for hire rate after graduation (unemployment is serious in south korea) they press professors to give them good grades as possible.

In a mediocre university you learn how to run a VMware virtual machine in OS class and that's it.

Intel sure does - and they're more of a hardware company than Apple is...

However, probably their candidates have to show some projects with electronics and FPGA. Again, Intel has lots of "pure software" development, for example their own compiler, profiler, debugger and rest of similar tools, bundled into IDE.