General :: Physical And Virtual Memory Upper Limit For 32 Bit?

I have a 32 bit Ubuntu installed and my Laptop has 4GB RAM, but only 3GB is considered by Linux. My question is: what is the reason for the upper limit on physical memory ?

Code:
dmesg | grep Memory [0.000000] Memory: 3052428k/3112960k available (4673k kernel code, 56364k reserved, 2121k data, 656k init, 2200904k highmem) I am familiar with the virtual memory concept where linux splits upper 1GB for kernel and lower 3GB for user processes. In total, linux 32bit can address 4GB virtual addresses. Does this meant that 1GB of physical memory is already mapped to 1GB of kernel space and Linux only shows the remaining 3GB physical memory left for the user in the above command.

I did some searching on the internet and found some articles related to this, but it only confused me further since some articles suggest 4GB is the upper limit with mentioning whether it's virtual or physical memory, some bring in the concept of PAE, etc. I'm relative new to Linux's memory management, so it'd be really helpful if someone could answer this.