There is a place for the low-level details: computer architecture, compilers, and operating systems. Students should take these courses to be well-rounded and to see how theory is translated into practice, but elsewhere things should be done at a high level.

I'd disagree somewhat. Data structures, from a CS perspective, often involve learning about low-level implementation details (why is accessing a hash O(1)? Why do array elements have to be the same size? What's the difference between representing a graph as a linked list versus a 2-dimensional matrix?). It's similar with algorithms.

Even though you CAN use completely abstract computational models to learn algorithms, many of the most important algorithms are designed around tradeoffs between real-world resources and being able to map abstract algorithms to a low-level language like C is a very useful skill to those who have it.

First, many people need a simple introduction to the entire concept of programming-- codifying precise instructions to a computer to get specific results.

Second, python is a great tool for exploration of other low-level systems, eg the socket library, the posix library, the os library.

Bad code is bad code. On the scale of encouraging good practices and discouraging bad ones, Python does pretty well given the very low overhead to get started-- something Java does not have.

Back in high school in the 70's our first language was a variant machine language CECIL - which we had to do by sending of coding sheets to a bureau.