I definitly agree.Concepts like map-reduce are still at the state of "heard
of" for a lot of developpers, most of them think "it's a nice idea" but when they need concurrency their immediate real-world thinking is basic threads. Showing simple tasks solved the classic way and the map-reduce way, showing the pros/cons of each approach would be a nice thing to have.
I encourage you to see what Murray Cole and Marco Danelutto said about the exact same thing on skeletons in 1999-2005. The reasoning still hold.
I'm not sure what you meant by this, did you talk about stuffs like http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mic/ColePisa04.pdf ? Searching google for what you said gives too much results about skeletons, I don't have time to read them all and I'm not sure what to look for anyway. Thanks for pointing out existing material tho :) Philippe