Exactly. Sony's upgrade is direct consequence of Microsoft position. If they were confident with their old specs, they wouldn't have gone for the very expensive 8GB version.
I don't think this is so straightforward. It is entirely possible Sony and devs were satisfied with 4GB of speedy GDDR5 even knowing Xbox will have twice as much but slower and only 75% available for games. But from marketing PoV that would be problematic, because for most people more = better, i.e. Xbox > PS4 because it has twice the memory, even if technically it wouldn't translate in any meaningful difference. So, when it turned out that 8GB is possible they did it, bettering Xbox both in speed and usable RAM-space.
Now MS's only hope is to sell Xbox as a 8GB+32MB machine, because - let's face it - a lot of people won't know the difference and obviously 40 > 8

