Back to the original question, games aside, if you do 3D work on your computer, more and more, 64 bit operating systems and 8 gigs of RAM or more are getting to be an absolute necessity. I use ZBrush on my Vista x64 dual core AMD 6000 machine, with only 4 GB of RAM and it's recently begun seriously limiting the mesh density I can work with. That 4 gigs gets eaten up FAST. It never was a problem before, but recently I've been doing work which requires far more subdivisions.
I'm building a new PC later this week, an Intel quad core 9450 and 8 gigs of RAM with Vista x64, but I bet I'll find a use for every last little bit of those extra 4 gigs. ;-)
Speaking of 3D, rendering can also wipe out your RAM pretty quick. Programs such as Maya, 3ds max and LightWave 3D use roughly ten times the file size in MB of an image map, in RAM when rendering, so a huge scene with lots of image maps can quickly eat away at that RAM... a 1 MB image map becomes 10 MB in RAM. Well, we optimize those images as well as possible, and use instances when possible, but even so, still it can get up there. Fighting such program's hunger for RAM has become an art form all its own. ;-)
That having been said, aside from a whole lot of multitasking and 3D, 4 gigs of RAM should be enough for most anyone, and definitely enough for current games, but as has been already said, Vista x64 will benefit from the more you feed it.
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