First off, you shouldn't be asking about lukeprog's opinion but about the opinion of the anonymous woman in his example, or about the distribution of that attitude more generally. Making friends and having fun with people is a statistical game, and the numbers are not on your side if you filter out all but a handful of social saints and atypical psychologies.
Second, improved social skills translate directly into avenues for social fun. If you're looking for non-social fun, you don't need more than rudimentary social skills, but it's rare for people to be completely without a need for social interaction.
As to childhood, I don't know about you, but my childhood would have been much more pleasant if I'd known to avoid avoidable rudeness and absorb unintended slights aimed at me. I'd also hazard a guess that younger children are wired in some way to have more social plasticity than adults (though note that that doesn't mean tolerance); late childhood, where social roles become less fluid and more important but social skills are still poorly developed, can be pretty hellish especially for the nerdier folks among us.
Oh, I mistook
has communicated that he is confident and successful with women and knows how to show them a good time.
to be an assertion on lukeprog's part that "a good time" was dependent on competent social skills. I now see the intention was that the man was communicating confidence, success, and charm.
Still, haven't we all been raised to be accepting of other people. I still don't understand why it takes a saint to allow others to be themselves. There are plenty of criteria to judge people on besides eye contact, voice modulation, posture,...
Edit - many apologies to anyone that feels that this discussion was a waste of time.
I just ran across an article (http://techno-anthropology.blogspot.com/2011/04/rough-guide-to-social-skills-for.html) on Hacker News that gives the barest minimum of a guide for social interaction. Unfortunately this isn't the high-quality advice you need to really handle social situations, though it will help with a few of the worst problems.
A few other rules that will help:
On the physical side:
This is a long list, and it isn't even close to complete.
I'm linking to http://lesswrong.com/lw/372/defecting_by_accident_a_flaw_common_to_analytical/ at the suggestion of David Gerard. It has a lot of deeper discussion into why this is worth knowing.