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There is a rather long conversation about Agile QA here: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=38785, which started in response to to a speech by Scott Ambler. There are various digressions and arguments, but a few snippets I want to repeat here:

Ranjiva Prasad wrote:

The software industry should aim for zero defects, through improved tooling and training. This is an ideal but as the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen (continuous improvement) says, if you don't start to take small steps towards an ideal, you'll never improve.

Cameron Purdy wrote:

You can't have real quality without a healthy lust for kaizen, and you can't have it outside of an environment in which all participants feel individually and corporately responsible for it. Thank you for putting it so succinctly.

Dave Rooney wrote:

I personally believe that there are things that automated tests can't test well - aesthetics, ease of use, proper correlation to the business work flow, and, yes, exploratory testing. After all, there are things that testers do that normal humans would never dream of! :)

My response to Dave Rooney -- without the automated tests keeping the developers on their toes (and other practices like Pair Programming or Code Reviews), the testers will have to waste their time finding bugs that are NOT related to aesthetics, ease of use, etc. They will instead spend all their time finding bugs that the programmers and automated testing could have caught.

In response to Ambler's contention that agile techniques can reduce "QA" staffing down to 10% of their original numbers, I think many companies are already understaffed in their testing departments. The benefits of agile methods will let the testers become a more strategic and proactive part of the process, and less of a reactive part. This does involve different skills for testers -- just like agile development requires programmers to master skills like refactoring, TDD, incremental design and automated testing.