Of course OSX works the same way. You can only commit to RAM a max of main memory + page file. That is really not that huge of a deal in Windows.
Just check in the taskmanager the commit amount after you use the whole thing like you intend to. Open all that apps/games and stuff use them like you would. Check the commit charge. If it is above 80% of your main you should probably keep a bit of a pagefile around.
You don't have to disable a pagefile completely you can also shrink it to whatever extra you really need. Set a very low minimum size and a maximum of 1024MB or 4096MB. I usually put a max of 2GB.
Here is my VM with Win8. I give it 2GB main RAM and 512-2048MB pagefile. I never need more as all I use it for is small apps and Office stuff. I never browse in the VM but always in OSX. Native bootcamp boot it gets all the 8GB and the pagefile I just leave at the same, I wouldn't need it for games which rarely need more than 2-3GB.
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2.5GB is the current total which can grow to 4GB if it needs to. 1.1GB is actually committed.
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*No idea why the images don't work here. You can click on them. Tinygrab usually works in most other forums and even in this at times. The BBCode Editor seems broken.
The commit charge is low. If that maxes out you should give it more room or you will soon encounter errors. If it consistently just stays slightly below a bit more pagefile also helps. I the latter case Windows would page out stuff it considers of little importance and use the free space for caches which help performance instead. OSX does the same. They page out before they actually have to, to make room for caches that technically don't need to have any room. Lots of people then get fuzzed up about 1GB swap use even though that doesn't mean OSX has too little memory just that it thinks it can do more useful stuff with it. Quite often the OSes are wrong about that. Especially since we have SSDs caches are a bit of a waste of space but they would offer their memory to apps in need if needed, so it doesn't hurt.
Windows 7 usually doesn't crash if it runs out of memory. You get an out of memory error and the application causing it may crash. Such an error is a clear sign of too small of a page file. XP had problems without a page file entirely. Windows 7/8 are fine but just leaving the option with a small start size and moderate max size doesn't hurt. If you need anything more than 2 GB frequently or 4GB very infrequently you really should just upgrade your RAM.
