There's a lot of fuzz in this thread, from some people being obsessed with looking at gigahertz's and turbo speeds to some comparing apples (nMP) to oranges (MP 2012).
One item though has not been addressed, namely whether the pricing of the 12-core model makes any sense...
In the 2012 model, those users running software which was scaleable could go from 6 to 12 cores for as little as 800 $ (3,33 6-core to 2,4 12-core) (prices from everymac.com).
With the nMP, the lower-end 12-core models are no longer, and the price difference between the 6-core and 12-core models is a whopping 3000 $
What this actually means is that users of scalable applications (i.e. those which care more about cores than processor speeds) are not as well served by the current lineup as they were by the old lineup.
It remains to be seen, whether apple will at some stage also start offering the 2,4 Ghz 12 core version as a BTO -alternative...
RGDS,