Conventional software QA engineers and agile

As I learn more about and gain more experience with testing in an agile environment, I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the suitability of conventional QA engineers in agile environments. Since agile methodologies stress that the entire team is responsible for testing and that as much testing as possible be automated, the QA specialist has limited usefulness on an agile team.
I still believe that agile teams need people whose primary interest is ensuring quality. These team members should be primarily responsible for some traditional QA tasks: recommending the types of testing that need to be performed, recommending and/or planning testing strategies, tracking that all the necessary testing is performed, etc. But on an agile team, not all of the test writing and execution itself is necessarily performed by these same team members.
So, what does this mean for conventional QA engineers?
When asked for career advice, I’ve always recommended that QA engineers become as technical as possible: learn programming languages, testing tools, etc. Quality assurance in an agile environment just strengthens the necessity of this recommendation. I don’t think it’s necessary for QA specialists to become capable of writing production code (though it’s helpful!), but a more technical QA engineer can work on a larger portion of the automated test architecture, test writing and execution.
I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on this.