I think not having them memorised can be what puts weaker children off maths later on. They're the ones that don't understand fractions and algebra as well as they should, or get it wrong because of their tables, or are too slow at it, etc., and they think they're bad at maths. So it's not that you need tables for daily life as an adult, necessarily, but they're very useful for secondary school maths, and for realising that you are capable of doing maths instead of thinking it's all too hard.
Understanding needs to come first, which is often via counting methods. But having them by memory is awfully useful too. You can memorise without chanting, though, and still have them instantly available. In fact, some people who learn by chanting STILL have to chant through the table to get to the one they want. Children need to practise them randomly/instantly, whether they use verbal or visual or kinaesthetic or other sorts of memory to do so.
I thikn it's useful to know how to do the chunking thing as well - the 10x7 and 2x7 to work out 12x7, because that's a very useful skill for doing any kind of 2 digit multiplication in your head. As long as the tables from 2-9 are learned (and 1 and 10, obviously, but that's more understanding than memory!), then you can figure out any of the others quite easily. Knowing the 12x isn't vital, although I do still find it useful as so much still comes in multiples of twelve (hours of the day, for example).