New computers are coming with gigabytes of ram, I have 2. On the other hand, I rather enjoyed watching a quicktime crash take down only 1 tab. I kept loading it repeatedly.
I have 4, that means nothing when the browser keeps bloating up and taking gigs itself because opening and closing lots of tabs all day long fragments the memory so badly that it can't release ram back to the OS when you close some tabs.
The main touted benefit I've heard of Chromium's tab-threading is insulation, so if one tab crashes it doesn't bring the whole browser down.