"It would indicate that games have finally really started leveraging advancing processor tech (like multiple cores) where the i7 does have an advantage."
You would think so, but then wouldnt an FX-8350 outclass any i7 up to say, a 4770 for this game? The weakness of the Bulldozer/Piledriver is that unless you have an app that can leverage all 8 of its integer cores, it gets stomped by 4 core i7s, due to the extreme disparity of the individual core performance. But when all cores get saturated, they're actually pretty competitive with their contemporary i7s.
I'm going to guess until we see some cpu stressing benchmarks of this game that it is still going to be ruled by quad core cpus with the highest per core performance. Being Vulkan, it *should* have less of a single thread overhead than a DX11 game, but I'll be shocked if say, an i7-6900K (8 core) beats a 6700K (4 core) at their default clocks.