Desktop hardware has been 64-bit since the 2003 Athlon 64, 2004 Pentium 4 and 2003 PowerPC G5. Servers 10 years+ earlier(X). I guess 9+ years on the desktop is "not too long" if your beard is long enough :)
Software not so much though, 64b XP basically didn't exist, and for 7 I've no idea what the ratio is. And 64b on Windows is a complete fuck-up (even when running a 64b Windows), apple's "fat binaries" made the transition smooth as butter for most users (the only issue I ever had were a pair of kernel extensions), in 7 64b is still screwy and the vast majority of software available seem to remain 32b.
Obviously it's not representative of all users, but Steam breaks down its hardware survey by OS version. The 60% using Windows 7 64bit is a convincing majority.
64b on windows is a fuck-up? I haven't had a problem with 64/32-bit compatibility since windows 7 came out, other than devices that only have 32-bit drivers. And you'll have that problem anywhere - even Apple's marvel of engineering where you double the size of executables won't solve that.
Software shipping as 32-bit isn't a bad thing. It means it will run on more machines. Shipping a Windows application as 32-bit has NO negative consequences unless your application needs more than 2GB of available address space, with a couple rare exceptions like shipping device drivers or debugging tools.
Apple's "marvel of engineering" actually does. You can launch an app in 32-bit mode (while running in 64-bit mode) should you require interoperability with 32-bit components. All actually pretty neat. And given that most of an app isn't executable binaries (and hasnt been since forever) the size of executables isn't a big deal.
(A few years ago I had to run Safari in 32-bit mode to test unity web apps for the brief period where unity didn't offer a 64-bit plugin.)
> 64b XP basically didn't exist ... And 64b on Windows is a complete fuck-up
What do you base those statements on? I changed to 64 bit at Windows XP, never looked back and stayed there on multiple machines through Vista, Win7 and now win8.
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012 are both 64 bit only. There are no 32-bit builds of these OSs.