I am no expert, but it is easy to imagine that a 50 plane battle over London at full detail will be impossible to acheive , even with top notch gear and super-optimized code, if SLI/XFire, multicore/ multithreading and 64 bit system are NOT eventually available...
And remember those "hidden" features such as "dynamic weather and super clouds" and many other "surprises" that Oleg told us about would totally cripple any system, even in few years from now, without the "SLI/XFire, multicore/ multithreading and 64 bit system"... This game is to big and complex not to include those features that are the only means of future proofing any game for the next 10 years...
But who knows ? Maybe 1C got it all wrong...

Salute !