These are going to gain in popularity because the exponential increases in clock speeds over the years is dropping significantly...
plus, all of the dumb fuckers out there need hyperthreading or multiple processors to help reduce the burden of all of their goddamn spyware! :-)
---Jack Handy
LOL. Yeah, it's a point well taken, but I'm sure you know as well as I do that the majority of developers write software and don't worry about resources the way our predecessors did. IMHO the bloat in the OS's you are referring to are nothing compared to the poorly written apps available off-the-shelf and otherwise. :-)
Yeah will partially depends on how software companies license. There is talk of you pay extra for dual-core.
More than that it will depend on the adoption of concurrent programming (multithreading). If you have software that leverages multi-processors, then great. Otherwise, your spyware just ends up running faster. :-)