Good points about VMs and edu market.
Open Adobe Premiere and After Effects load up a few 4K sources and start editing and talk to me about 2-4GB ram for 4K....
Even if MBPs had 32GB, you still will hit CPU & thermal limits which matter a great deal in rendering, and which are far less than an iMac. I imagine you're looking at a pretty limited set of use cases where 32GB freed up a speed bottleneck that the CPU didn't then quickly hit. Even more so factoring in these use cases needing to be mobile.
Also, Premiere / After Effects can most definitely take advantage of the improved disk IO, now that its available. As usual, developers will have to adjust to the platforms they're on. Having graphics performance doubled and disk IO up 66% is not a terrible state of affairs for rendering.
I'm not saying 32GB isn't important but there's a pretty understandable logic as to what fundamental constraints they're dealing with and how those compare to the market.
I think one of the good points made last week is that at this point, you're into workflow management when you hit limits like RAM because, yes, you could run two more VMs on your laptop if you had 32GB instead of 16GB, but you're already running 4, and then you'd run 6 and complain you couldn't run 10. Your base laptop will always have some limit that you'll need to deal with.
The question remaining unanswered for me is how much developers, like creative professionals before them, are influencers that drive secondary sales. I remember people crying doom for Apple when they gave up being the primary education computer with sweet deals for schools and students, because KEY DEMOGRAPHIC KEY INFLUENCE POINT KEY... and yet it didn't appear to hurt them at all. I actually question the whole "influencer" theory of marketing because of it.