So a naiive ./configure && make will configure for host == target == powerpc64 but still (wrongly so in your opinion?) build stage1 as 32bit binaries (but defaulting to -m64 code generation now), and the following stages will now become 64bit.
That's most *definitely* wrong because we're lying to configure and saying we're building a native compiler when we're really building a cross-compiler. We're lying as to what the host is!