Well, 999USD seriously, choke up, Intel's just robbing us all.
Have you ever read some benchmarks, then you should know that in REAL-TIME, a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad with 2.67 GHz clock speed will give you the best performance.
So, if you have a Q6600 OC to 2.67GHz, and a QX9770, you won't get more than 5% rel-time performance increase trust me. And mind you, this also applies to the Core 2 Duo's.
So, it is not the increasing number of cores that is going to help, we need something new, something that created a revolution just like the Core2 xxxx did.