Misleading terms such as "abstraction level" tend to suggest that abstract-minded people can do anything that concrete people can do, but this may be an artifact of the values embedded in the educational system. Education is geared towards the strong suits of abstract-minded people, such as coming up with clever interpretations and using difficult words. However, the real world has equal use of either orientation.
While having a high degree of abstraction often entails a certain cerebral agility when it comes to discussing abstract ideas, the downside seems to be an increased openness to unsubstantiated, sometimes even bizarre, ideas. In philosophy, for example, there is no end to the amount of societies that have been dreamed up by abstract-minded researchers and which work perfectly on paper, yet do not work in the real world. A classical example to this end is "How would you feed New York City?" While many an abstract-minded person would attempt to come up with a new and better system for supplying NYC with all the food and drink it needs, the only correct answer hitherto proven to be succesful is, "I wouldn't." New York City is fed by a multitude of concrete and realistic people, each keenly perceptive of his or her link in the chain. There is no grand abstract mastermind, nor is there any master plan. Everytime and everywhere such a master plan has been attempted for any free city, the result has been shortages of foodstuffs and a dramatic decrease in the number of different foods available.
Finally, another drawback of being abstract-minded may be clinging too much to one's intellectual intuition, that is, one's subjective, internal ideas about how things are and what they mean. Many controversies in science and philosphy have been (and are) really about abstract-minded people clinging to their subjective intuitions about how things are rather than weighing the evidence factually and realistically.