Parallel Lines

The fact that multiple cores have been out a long time is nothing new, you are 100% correct. But, what is new is that the multicores today as you point are available to everyone. It is difficult to buy the cheapest PC today without at least two cores. In perhaps a few years we will see 100 or more cores on a laptop.
The problem is a lot of the people who program applications for this new wave of machines are not scientist and have a difficult time wrapping their arms around how a real multicore aware application is built. Perhaps frameworks that take the drudgery out of multi-core parallel solutions are a better route. At Pervasive we have started using a 100% Java framework that we developed in house. It allows our engineers to focus more on building applications and less on the repetitive tasks associated with multi-core applications (thread management etc.).
Our framework is focused on data intensive problems with large data sets. Some of the applications we have used it for are pattern matching, validation, transforms, etc. The framework (Pervasive DataRushTM) takes advantage of three different types of parallelism; pipeline, vertical and horizontal partitioning. While not a solution for every multicore application, it has allowed us to build very scalable very efficient multicore aware apps. We offer the framework for free download at PervasiveDataRush TM if you are interested.