Yes, for servers! Hard failures are much easier to deal with than soft-not-dead-but-still-useless states.

echo 1 > proc/sys/vm/panic_on_oom

Interesting. The company I just left sells a load balancer/application server/do-everything-box and one of the rules of the coding is that it must never crash. Even out of memory errors need to be recovered from and we shut off the kernel feature that makes malloc not actually malloc memory.