64 Bits are Overrated

"I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There's zero benefit a consumer gets from that. Predominantly... you need it for memory addressability beyond 4GB. That's it. You don't really need it for performance, and the kinds of applications that 64-bit get used in mostly are large, server-class applications." -- Anand Chandrasekher

most desktop apps never use more than 1 gigabyte of memory (mostly due to the von-neumann bottleneck). And 32bit still allows using more than 4 gigs of memory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

So basically 64 bits just waste transistors.

Adding up all my currently running processes minus Firefox and Flash Player gives like 100-200 MB usage (Win 7, 2GB installed) -- I'd really agree on the 1 GB thing: if you can't have a system connect to the internet and read some news or watch a video with <= 1 GB you have some awful software installed on your computer. But we're getting there -- with my setup and usage as above, I still have occasional accesses to the pagefile.
Personally, I still mostly compile to x86 (knowing that x86_64 is often faster).

I've been wondering though: what does 'n Bit' (8, 16, 32 or 64) even mean? 8 bit machines could usually address 16 bit, some 32 bit machines had 64 bit wide regs for arithmetic and such (x87 has 80 bits...) and modern x86_64 machines can usually address 'only' 48 bit (most likely less, chipset-dependent) and currently have up to 256 bit wide regs (with AVX; 512 bit wide starting in 2015) -- couldn't/wouldn't they advertise those as 128/256/512 (instead of 64) bit CPUs? We all know the consumer likes bigger numbers even if s/he doesn't know what they mean.