I'd argue the other way, but things may be different for you, depending on a lot of things. :-)

I currently have 4 running virtual machines on my Macbook Pro. Three running a pretty basic Debian install for testing (yay, Chef) and one running Ubuntu with a graphical user interface. And yet, only half of my memory is wired/active, and with expanding disk volumes, the footprint on my disk is even smaller on my memory.

macbook pro users perhaps don't have the same definition of 'cheap' as many other laptop users? ;)