I think the point that people are making is that Maya 8's new features are not essential or really great upgrades to the programme from Maya 7 and therefore dosent really warrent the money for the upgrade, almost like people will upgrade just to have the Maya 8 name and not for the added features that it has. (although if 64 bit is a big issue for you then this could be a good feature)

If you have Maya 8 then you might know some big differences, in, say, speed, addressing memory etc that makes it much better than 7.0

Edit

Matt - Sorry for going over your point, I must have been typing whilst you posted