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As far as I'm concerned, lightweight just means it does the same thing as something else with less memory/CPU usage. Using panel addons as an example, drawing a frame is a pretty simple thing to do. Drawing lots of frames with lots of CreateFrame() calls is still a simple thing and not very intensive on the CPU or memory. However, having a config file to define the parameters of the panels rather than storing all the parameters in memory will result in a more "lightweight" feel and will obviously use less memory.
CPU usage and efficiency are not the same thing. Obviously if you have an addon that is really eating up CPU time it's a problem, but you have to consider what the addon is doing to determine whether or not it's being efficient.
Insofar as game stability goes, I haven't run into the issue in awhile, and I don't know if they made any changes for 4.0, but WoW was compiled as a 32-bit application. When it hit 2GBs of total memory usage it crashed right away (total for the game, not my UI). This also seemed to include video card memory usage in some tests we ran.
To an extent, though, a lot of it seems to be like a contest at this point. People are just shooting for lower and lower memory footprints. This isn't really a bad thing, competition breeds creativity. And if something can be done with less memory/CPU usage then that seems like a better and more efficient approach to me.
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