I can't wait until almost every program can utilize as many cores as you have. Then we'll see REAL improvements, with a quad core actually giving double the performance of a dual core. Plus, increasing performance will then be really easy. Simply stick more cores on a chip.
Thing is one of the main things most home users really need power for is gaming, and most games simply don't scale great with more cpu cores, then again, they don't scale well with more cpu speed, when you're gpu limited in 98% of games released.
There are plenty of apps for real cpu usage, encoding, number crunching for various things, that use multiple cores just fine.
But I do agree that we can see slightly better scaling and more compatibility as we move forwards.
DX11 brings better gaming compatibility with multithreading as its designed to try to split up its work across more threads. At the moment games can use multiple threads but its often various processes simply split to various cores, rather than a single process across multiple cores, so the more power hungry parts of the game are still limited to a single core and whatever speed that core can run at.
But its hardly surprising that 6 cores in a single socket would be a lower speed to maintain a TDP thats not completely nuts. Though as it seems to show, they can run a much higher speed without real issue, its simple that at 3.1Ghz that system probably uses a LOT of power.
The thing about virtualisation and multiple cores, that I'm dying to see eventually, is a single household computer, for 4-5 people, all stuck in a single room where no one can hear it, with 32 cores and enough power for all 5 people to play a game on a remote screen/mouse/keyboard on their own OS with their own storage.
Unfortunately I can see a long time between that being an idea and it working flawlessly and being widely available
