I have a series of posts about bits of characteristics that lend themselves to being a good DBA, and this is just one such bit (and a goal is to use a term that sounds negative and spin it positively). I do think however, that laziness is a major driving factor in helping one invent better ways of automating processes, because you could just have easily kept doing things by hand and possibly played the martyr over how hard it is to do that task daily.
I don't know that I can agree that a good deal of the impetus for creating the first computers wasn't laziness, though speed and correctness is obviously in there.
Now, to be sure, if one can see the laziness in the actual work you have done, well, that is another story. That was one of my points, was how hard an inventor (and a programmer is a form of inventor, in my mind) will work to avoid having to do manual, repetitive work. Could I balance my checkbook manually? Probably... Would I ever again? Not a chance, and if Microsoft Money ever stops working I guarantee that I will find another tool, or if they all stink like the last time I tried to replace Money, I will build my own. Of course, that effort would take me orders of magnitude more time than just managing my checkbook by hand, but the effort to do the repetitive task makes me feel bad, whereas the process of creating the tool to automate the process has little repetition involved and ends up eliminating a task I don't like.
So in the overall equation, a great programmer isn't "good for nothing lazy", but is too lazy to do repetitive tasks that a machine can do for them.