Windows Phone runs really well on 1GB of RAM. My mom's old phone was a HTC running on Windows Phone 7 and had 512MB RAM and ran very fast without any issues, even with several apps opened in the background.
Yeah, I would buy a smartphone with 1GB ram if the price was good, although I'm not very fond of Android, and I'm looking forward to getting an iPhone 6.
It's amazing that the iPhone 6 Plus is still one of the fastest smartphones with 1GB of RAM, and a dual-core CPU. The iPhone 6 even beat the Nvidia Shield tablet which is the fastest Android tablet in some benchmarks.