Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time.
Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host you might need more memory, but I find for most app server work loads, you end up overloading your storage i/o (even 4Gbps HBAs have their limits).
To be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores.
But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.
By my reading of this pdf, each physical CPU requires a license and each license allows for 24-48GB of guest ram. It seems they're specifically trying to limit licensing by vRAM, rather than CPU because there are more cores in CPU's now.