Was the birth of 3 channel 3 x 2GB ( or any 3 x XGB) a failure. I put together an i7-950 build with a GTX 460 768mb , ocz 120 GB SSD, Lg 10x blu burner & Windows 7 64bit. It is used for video trans-coding blu-ray content. It surprised me to see i7-2600 offered with 2 X XGB.
The next iteration of the Intel chipset will incorporate 4-channel memory. I don't think triple-channel was a failure at all. Once other bottlenecks in a given architecture are eliminated, having the potential to pass more data faster (bandwidth) among components will only lead to increased performance.