Broadly speaking, if your idea is really something that you think people/customers will want to use, you want a guy to be telling the world what you're doing and getting insights into how you could be doing it better.
Depending on the idea/product/vision, you could argue that that guy is as valuable or more valuable than a coder.
The best way to meet programming partners is to go where the programmers are - tap your friend network and, if you're close to a technical school, your location network.
I was a section leader for CS106A/B/X at Stanford and Eric Roberts was my undergrad adviser. I graduated in 08 and all through my 4 years, the number of students majoring in CS and taking CS106A/B/X was increasing rapidly.
Personally, I think that it's fantastic. Programming is a great skill to be exposed to even if you're not a programmer. There's no shortage of hard problems to be solved in CS and the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.
From my experience of teaching at least 100 kids who have taken the CS106s, no one has done it for a higher salary out of college - a lot of non-CS majors take it to satisfy the Engineering GER (a requirement) and the rest take it out of interest.
Yes, yes indeed.