[cgranade]

You need more classical resources to model a qubit in generality. This is because a qubit can be in the "0" state, the "1" state, or in any superposition between them. For a single qubit, you can describe an arbitrary superposition by two angles [1], each of which is a continuous real number. While you can't extract both of these parameters from a single measurement, a classical computer has to know both angles to simulate that qubit. Thus, it's more like that you need two floats to simulate a single qubit.

When you have more than one qubit, the requirements get much worse, as you can have superpositions over all of the possible classical states. When you work through the math, you find that you need a vector of 2^n - 1 complex floats to model a register of n qubits in full generality. Going from a classical bit to a classical trit does nothing to help with that exponential scaling.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere