>> it's a little strange they didn't do it

Exactly. It smacks of someone at Apple saying "Hey, if we keep the base at 16 gigs it will make more people upgrade to the 64, which will be more money".

The extra ram is a great way to future proof the device, for starters. I remember how shitty the 4th gen iPod Touch ran with only 256.

Not increasing the RAM is like retroactively future proofing previous devices. As noted, updates (OS and apps) degrade quickly on devices with less memory once newer devices that have more come out. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a 2GB device, but I have little doubt that 1GB devices would be rendered half useless by memory hungry updates within six months if that were the case. Software abhors a vacuum.

True but considering iOS 8 works right back to the 4S I wouldn't be too worried. Plus most people are on two year contracts and upgrade after that.

I'd have to really wonder how well it runs on the 4S. People have gotten burned in the past, downloading the latest iOS for their phones that Apple advertised as technically being able to be updated, but really didn't work out well in practice. IIRC the iOS3->iOS4 upgrade was like that.

> Why does this matter? Apps run great as is.

Safari doesn't play well at all with multitasking. I have to cross my fingers whenever I want to copy something into a form from another app because chances are the page will reload when I come back to Safari since it ran out of RAM. I also often get into the situation where I can't even tab between just 2 pages since Safari runs out of RAM and reloads each page.

Apple fixing Safari's bad behavior and letting it sleep its state to flash would work too, but 6 iOS versions later it looks like they're incapable of that.