In a modern environment, expectations of memory measured in whole gigs is commonplace. In fact, even baseline prebuilt machines are starting to come with 1 gigabyte of ram standard. "power user" rigs of 4 gigs are not unheard of, and some software/video/3d modelling developers are running around with 8 to 16.
Point of order, nowadays you can buy a two gigabyte stick of ram for $20 to $30.
So yes, by these standards, half a gigabyte is in fact "low end".