I guess it depends on what kind of semantics you apply to "theory guy". In my mind it's not at all dismissive.
I mean it in it a foundation sense, rather than an applications sense. He has done great work with a whiteboard and pure thought, without the need for terabytes of data and thousands of machines.
Remember, though, that the AT&T group Vladimir came from, and that informed his work, was much in the mold of linking theory and practice. Where "practice" (at that time) was working on the handwritten digit problem -- the now-cliche NIST dataset.
