wbmw: Re: It will be interesting to see if any of the alternative methods can be as malicious as the buffer-overflows.
Hackers will, no doubt, find new and interesting ways to ruin peoples' days. NX will protect a few computers from a few risks for a while. It will undoubtedly become obsolete at some point in time.
Interestingly, while I disagreed with your opinion that 64-bit is a marketing gimmick, I must admit that "Advanced Virus Protection" smacks just a bit of gimmickry, even though it might have some effectiveness for a while. I do believe that NX is a good thing, and it will save some butts, but to market it as "Advanced Virus Protection" is a bit of a reach.
On the other hand, 64-bit computing will one day be the mainstream paradigm, and as such, it seems much less "gimmicky" to me.