Compile errors due to misspelling and "what was that function called again?" expeditions are distractions. My department did us a great disservice by never even hinting to students (at any level) that tooling can make them go away. It was almost painful, working on group projects, to see my classmates struggling so hard just to move around the code. Being unable to seamlessly work your editor and navigate your codebase is just as crippling as hunt-and-peck typing. Is it worth a lecture? No. But a mention? Absolutely.
VCS is essential in a solo project of any real complexity because you will reach intermediate milestones, go off on tangents that don't pan out, and then desperately wish you had a way to get back to the working state you had hours previously. A true VCS with branching and merging is technically overpowered, since you could just make copies of the source for each "commit," but you may as well just use Git.
Build system is not about shipping to people, it's about running what you just wrote on your own machine when it's bigger than one unit of compilation (C file, Java class, whatever). You don't need anything fancy, can just be Make or a shell script, but building and running the whole project should take no more than a few keystrokes. Kids should be fumbling with GCC flags for maybe one assignment, not 4 years.
On the very first day of programming, all you need is a REPL. But once students are doing programming projects of nontrivial size, they should be invited to try incorporating the tools that make them manageable.