I've found many users who are most vocal in complaint about OS upgrades have actually reversed the order of operations, looking first at hardware, then at OS, and lastly at applications.
That could mean, for someone 100% logical, upgrading the hardware more often than the software?
I'm with Rhossydd here : my XP system works great with LR, whose memory requirements didn't hit anywhere near the 32-bit limit (a few hundreds MB actually) - and if memory was such a limiting factor, it would have been wiser to exclude altogether Vista-32bits and 7-32bits from the requirements.
For PS, that's another story of course... but I (almost) don't use it anymore.
And at least for the beta version, it might have been more useful not to exclude one third of a user base from taking a peek at it. I'd be glad to install it on my system, knowing well it is unsupported, and not touching to the incriminated video features.