Phone companies have been differentiating their models based on RAM for a decade. As have laptop and desktop sellers. The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.

I think a lot of people care about the downstream effects of memory prices, but I agree with you that they may not realize that they happen because of memory prices.