It does not matter what Bill said about 640k. What matters is what Bill did. He locked the 640k limitation in so tight that even with Windows 95 you had some remnants of 640k limitations. In 1987, with the announcement of the Mac II with 64meg of RAM and 16.2 million colors, the other guys paniced and announced other options that would soon be available on a PC. Forget that those promises took over a year to fulfill.
I was shopping for computers during all those years and even in 1995, I still had to deal with high mem/low mem swaps for some software.
Want printed proof of what could be done with 64 meg of RAM on a Mac II in 1987? Look for an article in Mac Week about FoxBase recompiling their dBase style database code to run on the Motorola chip in a RAM drive. FoxBase started programing for the Mac on the very next day.
You make lots of money by convincing a lot of people that you have the cheapest product. Take Vista, take the consumer for a ride.