This is a great article. It goes to show that software development is still well behind hardware, especially when you look at CPU utilization. Most of these games handle hardware a lot better than some of the games I've played. The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft, for example, will chug on the latest and greatest hardware simply because they utilize processors so poorly. My i7 sits at around 20% utilization max, yet it's holding the games back because they lack the parallelism needed to produce a smooth framerate.
You can tell when developers create games with the future in mind. Games that scale well always make me very happy. Crysis, Grand Theft Auto IV, Resident Evil 5, and virtually any game running on the Source engine are shining examples of this. Whenever I upgrade a piece of hardware, my FPS in such games reflects it. I would love to see more developers make games with scalability in mind. I'm always extremely disappointed when clock speed is the only factor that pushes FPS up.
Once again, this was a great article! Fascinating read. I sincerely hope that game developers - or rather, all software developers - will start pushing more for improvements to utilize resources efficiently. Hardware development has skyrocketed, and without software capable of parallel processing, a lot of that potential power is going to waste.