The only differences between conference sessions and workshops are a) length and b) number of people in the room. How you use an hour in front of a room of people is up to you. Conference sessions don't have to be limited to bullets on a slide or purely declarative knowledge.

I'd hate to plod through some example that I could work through better on my own time.

At conferences I want to be exposed to new ideas that I can then go look up on my own. Just to pick an example at random, as someone who has never used Haskell, I'd much rather hear about "so, what the hell is a monad, really", rather than, say, someone sitting there showing me how to write hello world in Haskell.