In a certain way, I agree with you about the power.
But somewhere back in my caverns, I have an old 386 board I could hook up and try to run Windows/2000 on.
I can remember the old days when somebody would ask me for 100 meg on disk and I'd have to struggle for it.
With the DB's and DBMS's that are out there now, you need horsepower. Big time. Especially if you're stuck with Oracle and don't have DB2.
LOL!!!! Win2K on a 386! THAT's RICH!!!
Oracle IS a pig, but the BIG bottleneck usually isn't CPU cycles or RAM, it's disk space. However, a large mission critical Oracle DB usually has it's own pair of fault tolerant servers.
My cheepo $50K boxes are tied into a 2.2 million $$$ EMC SAN.