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The virtual space can be useful too. I remember reading that Go had some issues due to the limited address space in 32-bit systems.

Yeah, that's an issue with conservative garbage collectors. When memory actually in use is a large fraction of the address space, then random values can look like pointers too often. When valid_memory << address_space, on the other hand, most non-pointer values won't alias a valid pointer.

The specific issue with Go was significantly mitigated in Go 1.1 by making much more of the GC precise rather than conservative. Here's a comment from about a month ago on the current state: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=909#c59

Isn't the x86_64 instruction set more RISC-like and compiler-friendly (i.e. more registers, 3-address instructions)?

Their 64bit kernels can run a 32bit distro too. With multiarch you also get to cherry-pick packages of the other arch.

But it is more work to make a 32 bit system. They are probably all 64 bit locked into 32 bit compatibility mode.