Yeah, of course, as with any higher-level framework/system, someone has to pay for the computing required. If you go try to get a developer instance of SAP to play around with, I believe the minimum requirements was like a 4xl ec2. That's before you even start writing crappy queries :)
No offense, but this is probably a big reason for the perception that SAP is a giant slow resource hog. Developers are abstracted so far away from the hardware that they have no way of knowing that their simple little program is resulting in 1500 database queries per page load.