What it means is that a different skill set is required.
I agree.
I said many moons ago, that once the 'spamcan' in the PPL syllabus has some form of LNAV as a standard (which is probably not far away) the concept of 'where am I' may completely disappear too.
I think there is a cogent argument to be made that 'where am I' as a concept should go away. At least, it should go away as a matter of first priority. One's position is no longer determined by peering through the glass of your bi-plane and following the dirt road to the landing strip. Where one is, in the first instance, a function of what flight system or what instrument one chooses to give attention. It's based upon what mental model one has constructed of events as feed to you by those instruments. What goes under the term 'loss of situational awareness' is really the result of data overload, or mode confusion, or wrong priorities. The amount of accidents where the GPWS is going off on the flight deck while the crew blithely plows the plane into the ground is astonishing.
The way I see it is that in modern FBW aircraft before you even get to the 'where am I' question the pilot has a credibility problem. Is that GPWS warning accurate or is it malfunctioning. Is that altimeter that's dropping 10,000 meters/minute on AF 447 accurate or the computer run amok. It's rare that the pilot loses situational awareness; it's more often the case that he's simply wrong about the situation in the first instance. And that's usually the result of the fact that he's chosen to believe his eyes (his biological system) over the instruments in the plane, or because he's chosen to believe what the instruments are telling him in terms of raw data rather than filtering that through the logic of the automation, or some other type of mode confusion.
The point that I'm driving at is developing new skills are not enough. To the extant that a pilot in a modern FBW aircraft is a computer jockey, he just doesn't need to do things differently he needs to think about flying differently. He needs new conceptual tools and different training. I don't think that retreating to paeans about 'basic airmanship' is healthy. All that will do is create a type of dual-consciousness that will exacerbate mode confusion rather than resolve it.