[nwsm]

> One could argue that we could have made much more ingenious use of, let's say, 1/100 of the memory and CPU we now have.

The counter argument is that this is over-, premature, or unnecessary optimization. If we can put 2GB of memory in a computer for $20, why spend millions on R&D that will be rewritten to make it work on 128 MB?

There is also an environmental argument for your point, but everything will always be a tradeoff to companies trying to build and sell devices quickly.