I doubt that building LEGO's has anything to do with building actual houses out of concrete and glass. That's my point. You can't build a real house out of legos and playing with them will not teach you anything about how actual houses are built. Same with programming - you can't learn to build good software by just mucking around aimlessly (unless you are some sort of genius). You have to learn how high-quality software is built.
Or maybe it just seems so to me, because I'm really really stupid and have to work hard to grasp even the easiest concepts :-)