From what I hear it is, but I've never had one either. I also don't see why you'd need more then 8gb of RAM in a laptop... not that it hurts. What about brand names? Because I would never buy another Asus for example.
I think he means about compatibility.
8gb are fine for most laptops, but when you want to run some VMs it quickly becomes a shortage. I usually go for 4gb each for Windows XP and 7 and then you might want another unix distro as well. If you go full SSD and don't have to worry about paging due to speed it's not that big of a deal though.
