Oh definitely. I agree. I assumed though that the "problem" itself was the main aim here, not testing if someone can write scaffolding error checking code.

How far do you go? Check that the memory isn't mapped as read only? ;) Check that there's actually some memory mapped into that address space?

Obviously you need both skills, but they're pretty related I'd say. If you can solve low level problems you can probably think through any potential issues, invalid inputs, edge cases etc and churn out code to deal with them.

I guess my issue is I don't see what being able to solve this says about someone, apart from "isn't completely terrible at programming".