Hey,
I have just finished my first year doing Oxford's CS course.
Personally I couldn't love it more. It has a reputation (and is) much more theoretical than other Computer Science courses out there, and I was unsure how I would cope, but it is actually fine. In your first year you do:
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2x 'Normal' programming modules
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Design + Analysis of Algorithms
I am working for an image processing company at the moment, and I personally am using knowledge from almost all of these topics day-to-day. In fact the only one which hasn't helped me hugely in this one project is Calculus.
So yeah it can be theoretical, and a different balance between theory and practically could be struck, but I would say Oxford's approach isn't so out-there.
In terms of employment, well loads of people secure internships in a field they think they might be interested in (be in programming, finance, academic, etc.) in their first year, and plenty more arrange something later on.
I would say that the course doesn't hold your hand and lead you through the easy stuff. The course teaches design of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, hardware considerations, and all that because it is important and difficult to fully appreciate if self-taught. If you want to be a programmer then there are lots of other things you should be teaching yourself (collaboration, code commenting, best practices) which you should pick up on your own projects or working on open source stuff.
It is not a software engineering degree, and it does not teach you everything you need to know to become a professional coder. However it does teach you all the hard, abstract, important stuff, and then give you the tools you need to follow further down that path if it is what you want to do.
Personally I prefer the straight CS course, I think it covers some important stuff that isn't in MCS, but both courses really do empower students with the core knowledge they need to do further learning where they feel they want to. You can probably change between the two in your first term at the discretion of your college tutors. I know someone who switched from MCS to Maths, which wasn't a problem he just had to convince the Maths tutors he was up to it.