Well it makes more sense to think about memory in pages or at least words (or cache lines if you think performance), disks in blocks and network in packets anyw

Well it makes more sense to think about memory in pages or at least words (or cache lines if you think performance), disks in blocks and network in packets anyway, memory is very rarely byte addressable natively... not being picky, just to underline that power of two adressable bytes does not sum it perfectly either.