Nothing special or worth the drama in my opinion.
They're just trying to balance all the different things while leaving the possibility for future proofing the system on the OS/applications level.
5.5GB for games, 1,5GB for standard OS and 1GB being left for future applications seems a really balanced approach.
Let's not forget why we have 8GB in these systems in first place....and hint...it's NOT JUST for games.
In fact the PS4 GPU and CPU were designed and targeted to run games with a memory budget of 4GB (actually even less because originally 4GB was the total memory, when Killzone4 was unveiled in February it used what? 3.5GB?).
I think people realize that a 100Gigaflops CPU and a 1,8Teraflops GPU are totally mismatched and underpowered to go with 8GB of memory if the purpose is just to run games.
The reason Sony decided to upgrade their memory was that 4GB were totally fine for games but they would have been left behind significantly with the OS, multitasking and applications.
The extra memory went mainly into adressing that. Microsoft is doing the same thing, 8GBs are not there just for the games, 3GB are allocated for the operating system.
Also the situation at launch will evolve and change during the years so we'll see much more stuff added, resources could be allocated differently, memory given back to developers,etc. In this phase is important that they take a balanced approach so that they don't end up like with the PS3 where they couldn't implement cross game chat (not to mention the new PS Store which barely runs on the system).