If you're going to end up swapping to disk most of the time anyway, the feature doesn't seem to be very useful. But with much faster CPUs, "many core" CPUs where your apps often won't manage to take advantage of the CPUs, and cheap RAM making lots of people buy huge amounts, the "cost" of using compression to offset swapping to disk seems to have dropped substantially, and the chance of avoiding swapping to disk entirely seems to have increased.