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Discussion on:
The Snow Leopard appreciation society

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Apple defaults to 32-bit...
olePigeon 25th Sep 2009
Apple defaults to 32-bit to ensure driver compatibility on consumer
machines. One of the criticisms of EFI is that Intel had the chance to
create a firmware that would allow software to address hardware in
both 32-bit and 64-bit, but they didn't. So unfortunately Apple will
have temporarily have to deal with drivers the way Microsoft does,
provide two different operating systems.

However, 64-bit applications will run fine under 32-bit OS X. At this
juncture, there really is no point in running 64-bit. I assume Apple is
in a transitionary phase. At some point XCode will be 64-bit only,
and all drivers and software will be written as 64-bit only. When that
happens, anyone running Snow Leopard or later will be able to
seamlessly boot right into full 64-bit without any major hiccups.

This will allow Apple to avoid maintaining two distinct OS products
like Microsoft does with Windows.

I wouldn't be surprised if 10.7 boots into 64-bit by default, with the
majority of all drivers ported to 64-bit.
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ie8 fix