I could use all the RAM available. Ideally I would need 8 GB. But my thinking is that with the high I/O throughput of the SSD in the Air, swapping from disk won't lead to a perceptible performance drop.

I will occasionally have access to a server for particularly intensive tasks. But I would like to be able to code from my bed, in a coffee shop, library, bus, etc. Hence my fascination for the Air.

What kind of stuff do you do that uses up 32 GB RAM? Is your data set huge, or are your algorithms RAM intensive?