I sill maintain that it's just plain stupidity to buy an out-of-date OS on a new system

Are you kidding?
Nope. Just reading off statistics from now:
- firefox 220mb (absolutely packed with extensions, this one's my fault)
- svchost 66
- jkdefrag 35 (running a scheduled defrag atm)
- sidebar 32
- explorer 30
- searchindexer 20
- svchost(2) 20
- desktop window manager (whatever the hell that is, it's a win component) 20
- audiodg (don't ask, I don't know ) 16
- msn 12
- xfire 10
- wmp 10
- objectdock 10
- squid 10

...it all ads up, quickly

I have around 41% usage on system start and after playing a game I'm usually down to 31% or lower, I also play quite a few new games and they all run fine, no matter the RAM usage. Maybe that will change with games like Crysis but even there 2GB should be enough for a nice gaming experience.
However, Supremem Commander profits from 4 GB and a Quad Core IIRC but then that game has some insane system requirements anyway.
Again, see my dislike of buying into the past.

There are games out there that can use more than 2gb; and that's not going to change. For a gaming system, I'd be avoiding that bottleneck wherever possible (and that's by buying a sufficient amount of ram)