Every physicist, theoretical, computational, mathematical etc...should have at a minuimum of one year of lab courses/experience at the undergrad AND graduate level. If you don't you have been severely cheated out of an important portion of your training as a physicist.
Even a theoretican has to be able to talk to and interact with experimental physicists and an important part of that interaction is having a rudimentary knowledge of lab techniques. My PhD advisor has told me that I have become a much better and more rounded physicist since I started interacting on a daily basis with my counterparts in the labs I deal with, matter a fact I spent a good part of this week in the lab working on learning to take data which is very important to the sucess of a program I am working on. How many theoreticians can say that they played an important part in the design, build, test and calibration of a measurement apparatus down to the choice of rotation stages and lock-in amplifier choice along with the specification of the detector systems. I spent time learning to program LabView to help in the control of the data aquisition, there wasn't a theoretician on the faculty at my university who could say that.
