Unmanned probes are certainly a good idea, to complement manned space travel. But would it have been as cool to have a probe be the first to climb Mount Everest?
It might not have been as cool, but I bet the first people to climb it would have appreciated having a robotically deployed shelter with fresh oxygen bottles and hot drinks waiting for them at the summit.
Preparing the ground with robots would allow humans to travel further, stay longer and do more in space, rather than just paddling around in LEO or camping on the Moon in a tin can for a few days at a time. We could do with having robotic bulldozers and excavators to carve out the foundations of permanent Moon bases, and facilities that will mine asteroids, build tanks and fill them with volatiles to supply future spacecraft with propellant, enabling them to be heavier, go further or go faster than if they were totally reliant on lugging everything out of Earth's gravity well. We should be working towards having a solid resource extraction and manufacturing infrastructure in space, so that missions keep getting cheaper and becoming more capable, and so that a human presence in space will ultimately become self-sustaining, and not reliant on imports from Earth.
When we're no longer paying $10,000 per kilo for everything we use in space, and are able to get at least a few important things at a greatly reduced cost, a lot more stuff will become feasable for mission planners, and it'll get us on the road toward becoming inhabitants of space rather than just visitors.
