As a student at Cambridge, I doubt Oxford is "far" more theoretical. The London Universities like Imperial are also notable for focusing on theory over practice.
I think they assume we can learn practical skills on-the-fly and they are not as beneficial as a solid theoretical grounding.
These Oxford interview questions are more difficult than I expected, especially under Oxbridge interview conditions. Like mentioned above, they want to see how you think over what you already know.
Generally all the top-tier universities are more theoretical than the lower tier universities.
Historically Oxford has been much more focused on the rigorous underpinning of CS by Mathematics than other universities, although in recent years they've been cutting down on this and moving closer to the CS syllabus offered by other top-tier universities.
Here's the course list for first year at Oxford:
• Functional Programming
• Design & Analysis of Algorithms
• Imperative Programming I
• Imperative Programming II
• Digital Systems
• Discrete Mathematics
• Logic and Proof
• Linear Algebra
• Calculus
• Probability
Unless you do CS with Mathematics at Cambridge, you'll probably be doing a much less mathematically intensive course.
In the first year all of us do Computer Science (2 papers), Mathematics (1 paper), and a science subject (1 paper, I did Physics). It is predominantly theoretical (something I found hard to cope with):
Although I think there is far too much content to learn thoroughly in three years, it does provide a broad understanding of what there is to know. Does Oxford have online course material, I'd be interested to take a look? I expect the universities overlap a lot but there might be some worthwhile additions.
Perhaps "theoretical" is the wrong word, what I meant is that Oxford courses tend to take a more formal & mathematical approach to topics than other universities.
It's worth noting as well that Oxford is by far the most theoretical of all the CS departments in the UK.