Do software companies value internships more than research?

I'm a freshman CS major and I can't get any internships! (my school has a very strict requirement which I think is BS--basically anybody who hasn't finished a list of courses required by the ECS department shall not participate in summer internships)

So I'm doing some research these days on natural language processing that hopefully will end up in some publication.

But here's the question: Do software companies value internships more than research? Am I wasting my time by not working on some programming projects or creating my own websites etc. ? (basically doing things FB/Google/MS would like on your resume)

More about me: I'm on a full-ride at a not-very-well-known state university (UTD) which has a relatively strong ECS department--and my career goal for now is getting into FB/Google after college, working as a software engineer for a while, than transition into their R&D departments (I'll probably need a master's for that, which, in turn, requires some sort of research experience as an undergrad--this is driving me crazy!!!).