Yep true true and true. I am far from a power user, I have a 2010 i7 dual core MBP and I just upgraded to a 2012 i5 iMac. I wanted a desktop as I had no need for a laptop anymore. Anyway I agonized over the i7 and 16 gb upgrades, until last night I ran the following on my MBP:
Safari with 15 tabs open
Premiere Elements Photo editing two pictures
Premiere Elements video editor with one HD movie open
1Password
iTunes downloading 2 HD movies
Email
Aperture
A bunch of services like Backblaze, Dropbox, OneTouch, etc
App Store
With all that open and running, I still had over 2 GB of memory free and was using less than 30% of my CPU power and the computer never lagged and no spinning wheels. I think the average user, even the occasional heavy user can easily get by with an i5 quad and 8 gb of memory for a good long time.
Yet I laugh when I read how the 2010 MBP just cannot handle most peoples day to day "workflow". I was seriously just going to buy a large screen and turn my MBP into a desktop, but my son needed a computer for school and a nice 21.5" iMac with Fushion drive showed up in the refurb store so I jumped on it.