I don't think they will survive unless they ship it with some in-house RAM, which I doubt it will be cheap. Time to go for PC133 SDRAM which is useless for data centers but very useful for all the other tasks.
If it's really BOM cost, it will come down after the crash (which cannot now be long postponed). If it's other things besides BOM cost, it's an opening for someone to make a better clone.