It certainly limits it from being useful if you don't have dollars to throw at high-end infrastructure, but it's not quite as terrible as it sounds. Effectively all it means is that you can't cold start it. How big a problem this is depends like anything else on the application in question.
As I write this comment I just know that in 5 years I will look at it and chuckle at myself but... it boggles my mind to consider a pure-RAM system that relies on at least one copy of the dataset being available forever in some system's "memory grid".
