Agreed. 90%+ of your everyday users fall into that category and probably around half of them don't even really need the upgrade. It just seems to be the knee jerk response buzz word. Strangely, the knee-jerk reaction happens to be the correct one in this case. Slow computer? More RAM. With just a bit of optimization however, that need for more RAM would vanish.
With that said though, I did precisely that in my aptly called userland laptop. I received it in the Nvidia lawsuit settlement and it was at the lowest of the low end. It came loaded with 2GB and seemed adequate for the mundane; email, internet and office...
However, for $50, I was able to quadruple the memory to 8GB (the max for this model). Now, the performance is amazing, especially for a crackerjack prize laptop. I can run what I already could better, run things that I couldn't before and even turn on some of the more blingy features in Win7.
As an aside, I learned a few things. Laptop builders have the habit of loading memory that functions, not the fastest the board is capable of supporting. I learned that this was not the case in mine, it was loaded with the 10600 it was capable of supporting. The memory I got was the MicroCenter "store brand" from A-Data and that also the same brand that the laptop came with as well.
Also, with shared graphics, I intended to turn up the amount "partitioned" for the graphics. I'm know that there is a function that will allow you to manually scale it, but I discovered that either Win7 or the graphics driver detected the new RAM and auto scaled the shared memory for me, so I left it alone.