Data science Ph.D. program, what do you think? As Yann LeCun mentioned, a number of PhD programs in data science will be popping up in the next few years.

NYU already have one, where Prof.LeCun is at right now.

A statistics or cs PhD in machine learning is probably more rigorous than a data science one.  Is data science PhD for the less mathy people like myself? 

Are these cash cow programs?

There is a huge industry demand for big data, but what is the academic value of these programs, as you probably can't be a professor or publish any paper.
It seems to me that the premise of a PhD is to expand knowledge in some little slice of the world. Since a "data scientist" is by nature is somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades it does seem a little odd to me. A masters program seems much more appropriate.

What do you hope to gain from a PhD? If the rigor scares (or bores) you, then what about a more applied area? Signal processing, robotics, applied physics, operations research, etc.