I thought that one of the major benefits of multi-core systems for every day use was that you could run several single-threaded applications simultaneously without them fighting for CPU cycles. This article doesn't even touch upon that...
Surely you gain benefits with single-threaded applications as soon as you start running a large number of them? I would typically have several virtual machines, PHP/Apache/MySQL running alongside a plethora of development tools.
Furthermore, the i7 architecture should also better serve the RAM requirements of multiple simultaneous applications versus the Core2.
The i7 must surely smoke the Core2 when multi-tasking. But these tests assume the "real world" single threaded application user would only be using one single threaded application at any one time.