I've gotta agree with that, though it really depends on your use case. If you simply need a machine for some simple web browsing, 500MB or a gig might work fine, but power user stuff will require, well, more power.
Moreover, I've installed linux on the laptop I carry around, and it does still stand the lower bloat and higher power efficiency, as I went from 3ish hours to 6-7ish hours of battery life out of a charge. Also the stability of softwares such as blender improved somehow, no idea if that is related though.