Nowadays its realy cheap to have an updated PC, if you get some basic understanding of overclocking and what brands offer good value for money in diferent PC components.
For example, there are some high-speed DDR2 still in the market, now that DD3 is "fashion" but completely non-necessary.
Another example is a graphics card, there are a lot of ATI 4870 out there with more than enough performance for every game out there, in a completely insane price (lower than € 100,00)
Another fine example is to buy a very very cheap Core2Duo CPU with a good stepping, overclock it with minimum effort and stock cooling up to 3,2Ghz or more and you are set to go.
In the past you had to get € 300 graphics or € 250 CPUs or even € 200 memory sticks to have some upgrades, but now for a third of the price you can get a very very decent upgrade.
With this i am not ofc saying that you are all wrong and games shouldnt take into account people with lower specs and 3 year old computers, because its still an important market (and developers know that), but i also think that the days now are much easier to get good PCs and thus the graphics realy need to step up faster into a new generation of directx 10 quality.
