Not too long ago, there were hardly any 64-bit hardware in the market for average users, until they flooded the market and now every other Ma and Pa owns a Windows running on 64-bit.
X) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#64-bit_processor_timelin...
Software shipping as 32-bit isn't a bad thing. It means it will run on more machines. Shipping a Windows application as 32-bit has NO negative consequences unless your application needs more than 2GB of available address space, with a couple rare exceptions like shipping device drivers or debugging tools.
(A few years ago I had to run Safari in 32-bit mode to test unity web apps for the brief period where unity didn't offer a 64-bit plugin.)
What do you base those statements on? I changed to 64 bit at Windows XP, never looked back and stayed there on multiple machines through Vista, Win7 and now win8.
Windows Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012 are both 64 bit only. There are no 32-bit builds of these OSs.
Where is the "complete fuck-up"?
Consider this, most default builds (even the cheap ones) come with at least 4GB of RAM nowadays. The only machines I see with less RAM now are nettops, netbooks and other miniaturized builds. You need 64-bit Windows to fully take advantage of 4GB (with 32-bit Windows, you'll only see like 3.something), not to mention anything larger than 4GB is essentially worthless to a 32-bit OS. Dell isn't going to sell you a laptop advertised with 6GB RAM and then stick a 32-bit version of Windows on there that can only use <4GB.
(Now, this 4GB limit to 32-bit OS's isn't a problem with PAE. But why Windows has support for PAE but nobody seriously uses it is a story I don't know the details to.)