Why Use Virtual Memory In Modern Systems?
1. Every application on a modern system is running in its own virtual address space, and these virtual addresses are then mapped to (different) physical memory addresses. This is called "virtual memory".
You are talking about swap space, not virtual memory.
I have a system with Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) installed on it, and it has 4GB of RAM. However when I've been watching system performance, my system seems to divide the work between the physical RAM and the virtual memory, so I have 2GB of data in the virtual memory and another 2GB in the physical memory.
2. Just because Windows has poor memory management doesn't mean that swap space is bad in general, or is an outdated concept.
We are running AIX on a pSeries with 576 GB of main memory and lots of swap space, and it doesn't do this. It's a software problem - all you need is better memory management.