Memory may be cheap, but it is a limiting factor for a lot of workloads. If your memory consumption goes up by 2x, you need to provision 2x the nodes.
In fact, I've heard that one of the reasons IBM is investing in Swift is because it uses so much less memory compared to jitted Java. Apparently, most of their cloud workloads sit idle most of the time, meaning the number of client VMs/jobs/whatever they can put on a machine is almost entirely determined by memory use.
Also, memory usage to a large extent is performance and is power consumption. A random memory access is still on the order of 50-60ns, in that time you can do several hundred ALU operations. (This is assuming the memory is actually used and not just sitting around). See for example http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/library/202.pdf
"...computation is essentially free, because it happens “in the cracks” between data fetch and data store; on a clocked processor, there is little difference in energy consumption between performing an arithmetic operation and peforming a no-op." -- Andrew Black in Object-oriented programming: some history, and challenges for the next fifty years
