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I think it's not the prudish nature that makes a sex scene so obvious, but the fact that it's something one doesn't generally see. Most of the things people do in books are things that people generally do in public, or at do least with other people present. When it's something they don't generally do openly -- a serial killer stalking his prey, for instance -- the very doing of that act is either the focus of the book or a large part of it. So in general, anything you come across in a book is either something that generally isn't considered private, or is the focus of the book (perhaps because we're being voyeurs on something private). My hypothetical person picking up her niece at school, for instance, doesn't have to involve just the two of them; it wouldn't be unexpected if she was also driving a carless a co-worker home and picked up her sister's child too. Even the things literary characters do alone ... walking around a strange old house, perhaps ... are not considered private. They could have a party in that house instead. Sex is different, in that it is generally private, not something the reader encounters in the street on a regular basis. So when it does turn up, it becomes the elephant in the room -- or the shotgun on the wall. People notice it, just like they'd notice their roommate and his girlfriend humping on the couch much more than they'd notice the same two people eating nachos there. It's unusual, so it stands out. And when something in a book stands out (or has attention drawn to it by the author, hello cement mixer) there has to be a reason for it. The shotgun has to go off.
Basically, when an author presents something out of the ordinary, there has to be a reason for it. If the author describes a house as being painted pink with green trim, it had better be to demonstrate the eccentricity of its occupant, or function as a landmark, or in some other way serve the plot. If it's a romance novel, sex is indeed part of the plot. If it isn't, then there has to be a very good explanation why something we don't see every day has intruded on our literary lives. When there isn't, we do tend to get peeved, because we're waiting for that shotgun to go off and it never does.
Like a number of people, I keep going back to that cement mixer because it's a good analogy. Two people driving around in a cement mixer full of explosives isn't something you see every day. The author describes them and their actions various times. There's a whole subplot there. And you notice it because it's unusual: most people don't haul around truckloads of explosives (and of course it's generally a very private thing when they do). But that truck never explodes. It never does anything. The people driving it never interact with the main plot in any way. The shotgun is not only on the wall but there's a big sign pointing to it -- but it never goes off. Nobody ever even comes into that room. It weakened the book because the author spent reader attention on that subplot and then let it fizzle out, and the attention along with it.
The more private something is, the more important to the story it has to be. Sex, at least among high-tech humans, is extremely private, so when it shows up in a story, it has to be extremely important. When a reader finds that it was just gratuitously thrown in, like Tom Clancy's cement mixer, and goes nowhere, does nothing, that reader gets peeved.
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