64-bit kernel has no bearing on SL's ability to run 64-bit applications and their ability to address large amounts of RAM. The applications you mention aren't 64-bit yet, anyway.
I just got done reading this from
AppleInsider:
"Apple's 64-bit kernel requires both a 64-bit processor (a Core2 Duo or better) and 64-bit EFI.
However, running a 64-bit kernel on these machines is of limited benefit. While there are certain advantages with the move to a 64-bit kernel, including new security enhancements,
the primary benefit of a 64-bit kernel is being able to directly work with significantly more than 4GB of RAM, something that most existing consumer Macs and generic PCs can't do anyway.
For this reason, Snow Leopard also defaults to running its 32-bit kernel even on consumer models with 64-bit EFI. This prevents mainstream users from running into problems related to incompatible kernel extensions and device drivers (such as printer software), which aren't yet 64-bit.
This problem has helped repress the popularity of the 64-bit editions of Windows over the last several years, but won't hold up 64-bit Mac adoption because there is only one edition of Snow Leopard, one that runs on all Intel Macs and simply adjusts itself to the limitations of the given hardware.
Users who want to run the new 64-bit kernel on late modeled Macs (pretty much anything released after early 2008) can do so by booting with the 6 and 4 keys held down. If you're wondering whether your Mac has a 64-bit EFI firmware, you can type the command "ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi" into the Terminal. The response will identify the machine as either having 32-bit or 64-bit EFI.
What Snow Leopard does do is bring all Core2 Duo, 64-bit Macs (pretty much everything sold since 2007) up to speed with 64-bit system apps, from the Finder and Dock to iChat and Mail to background processes such as launchd and the system-wide spell checker. Running the 64-bit kernel or not, the singular version of Snow Leopard always runs 64-bit apps when running on 64-bit hardware; in contrast, no 32-bit editions of Windows can run 64-bit apps, even on 64-bit capable hardware.
Snow Leopard's upgrade to 64-bit system apps provides an overall speed boost due to limitations in the original design of Intel's 32-bit chips; the move to the new 64-bit x64 processor model, originally developed by AMD, solves these issues. Moving to 64-bit apps on other processor families, such as PowerPC, does not yield the same boost, but rather only incurs additional overhead, one of the reasons Snow Leopard is Intel-only."
That kinda says what you say but it also says that 64-bit kernal can work with more than 4GB of memory?
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