That also assumes that your data only needs consistency within a machine word (i.e., data types where the CPU can support atomic instructions). If you're just trying to ensure that 64 bits of data are consistent, that's fine, but that usually wasn't so hard anyway.
You need atomic operations at the synchronization points, but you can build arbitrary complex data structures on top of it. For example a lock free tree will stay consistent even if a process dies in the middle of an update (you might need to garbage collect orphaned unpublished nodes).
