I agree with you in that point with the economy only the truly able will upgrade to an i7 the prices are terribly high. I have been pushing the AMD/ATI 780g Chipset with a midrange X2 this combo really helps the overall performance of the whole system. I am a system builder and most of those people I get are on a serious budget many are just now upgrading from AthlonXP socket 462 & Pentium 4 Northwoods, yes most of thier pc's are dinosaurs but they were happy, however now with more and more online entertainment from Hulu.com to WarRock they are wanting more options and better speed. You can call them late to the table however this works to my advantage as the 780 & 790 chipsets from AMD can both be upgraded to Phenom AM2+ or AM3 boards in this way AMD has created an upgrade path that at the least envolves a processor upgrade and at best inlcudes a ram update to 1066mhz and soon the DDR3 will be available from what I have read on MSI, ASUS, BIOSTAR & ECS they plan to offer bios updates to enable better upgrade paths on existing motherboards granted some won't run the newer ram due to socket limitations but a good number of the processors will work. This path for me makes alot of sense and to my customers. While these boards are not Awesome they are very very good and provide more than adequate performance, if everyone really wanted a faster processor the Celeron & Sempron would never have come to any motherboard. I also realize that doesn't characterize 99% of the posters to this site, but the average person is just learning how to burn a dvd once they get to doing that is when I see them wanting an upgrade. Not to open a program faster but to rip, encode & burn video, edit, make a home movie, watch hd video content online, play many of the new free mmorpg's hitting the web and pc gaming is seriously making a grass roots comeback. I pick up games at thrift stores, garage sales, second hand stores and have been making a very nice extra profit while converting the consoled masses to pc gaming with the Athlon X2 processors.
My high end customers have been very happy with the Phenom though I admit it is not anywhere near where I had hoped it would be when it debuted my buyers placed second and third orders especially this past christmas as gifts to thier family. Most cite the affordable quad-core experience and again on the mentioned chipsets they perform quite well with the right memory and when needed the right ATI video card in hybrid Crossfire mode.

You would need to get a new motherboard to run DDR3.