This is my personal opinion, so I'm not sure it properly qualifies as an answer.
Why should we teach hypothesis testing?
One very big reason, in short, is that, in all likelihood, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, hundreds, if not thousands (or millions) of hypothesis tests have been conducted within a 10ft radius of where you sit.
Your cell phone is definitely using a likelihood ratio test to decide whether or not it is within range of a base station. Your laptop's WiFi hardware is doing the same in communicating with your router.
The microwave you used to auto-reheat that two-day old piece of pizza used a hypothesis test to decide when your pizza was hot enough.
Your car's traction control system kicked in when you gave it too much gas on an icy road, or the tire-pressure warning system let you know that your rear passenger-side tire was abnormally low, and your headlights came on automatically at around 5:19pm as dusk was setting in.
Your iPad is rendering this page in landscape format based on (noisy) accelerometer readings.
Your credit card company shut off your card when "you" purchased a flat-screen TV at a Best Buy in Texas and a $2000 diamond ring at Zales in a Washington-state mall within a couple hours of buying lunch, gas, and a movie near your home in the Pittsburgh suburbs.
The hundreds of thousands of bits that were sent to render this webpage in your browser each individually underwent a hypothesis test to determine whether they were most likely a 0 or a 1 (in addition to some amazing error-correction).
Look to your right just a little bit at those "related" topics.
All of these things "happened" due to hypothesis tests. For many of these things some interval estimate of some parameter could be calculated. But, especially for automated industrial processes, the use and understanding of hypothesis testing is crucial.
On a more theoretical statistical level, the important concept of statistical power arises rather naturally from a decision-theoretic / hypothesis-testing framework. Plus, I believe "even" a pure mathematician can appreciate the beauty and simplicity of the Neyman–Pearson lemma and its proof.
This is not to say that hypothesis testing is taught, or understood, well. By and large, it's not. And, while I would agree that—particularly in the medical sciences—reporting of interval estimates along with effect sizes and notions of practical vs. statistical significance are almost universally preferable to any formal hypothesis test, this does not mean that hypothesis testing and the related concepts are not important and interesting in their own right.
Best Answer
As I have to explain variable selection methods quite often, not in a teaching context, but for non-statisticians requesting aid with their research, I love this extremely simple example that illustrates why single variable selection is not necessarily a good idea.
If you have this dataset:
It doesn't take long to realize that both X1 and X2 individually are completely noninformative for y (when they are the same, y is 'certain' to be 1 - I'm ignoring sample size issues here, just assume these four observations to be the whole universe). However, the combination of the two variables is completely informative. As such, it is more easy for people to understand why it is not a good idea to (e.g.) only check the p-value for models with each individual variable as a regressor.
In my experience, this really gets the message through.