Not Everyone Needs Awesome
Having six billion different versions of a single operating system annoys me as much as the next nerd, but I can't find anything morally reprehensible about it. Atwood takes particular issue with it, but "segmenting the market" is not, as he claims, the same as "capturing consumer surplus", and his examples only work to undermine him.
All of these different "editions" -- of Windows, of Basecamp, of Stack Exchange -- are different in more than just name. They offer different features and thus can and should reasonably be subject to different prices. If it costs Microsoft X dollars to implement support for memory beyond 32 GB (an assumption, yes, but one I have no reason to doubt), then it seems reasonable that they should pass that cost on to the customers that are actually going to be using it. Just as it's reasonable for 37signals to charge extra to allot more disk space for your extra projects. Just as it's reasonable for Stack Exchange to charge for those extra pageviews.
The alternative is charging everyone the same price for the same (unlimited) features. That may sound good to power users like Atwood and me. And it is, but only for us. It screws over the guy with the small e-commerce site who only needs a couple gigs of RAM and one or two cores.
All Microsoft is asking is to get paid for the work that they've done. Just like 37signals wants to get paid for the resources you consume. Just like Atwood wants to get paid for the pageviews people consume that could have been sold to someone else. The only reason people object to this tactic with Windows is because they're used to getting everything, all the time, for the same price as everyone else.