Just think about it this way: IPC/clocks can be used by much more apps (and more common ones too) than more cores.
I sense you are trying (maybe uncounsciously) to rewrite what I said just to fit your optics better. "Games" turned into "flash games", "poorly threaded" turned into "single threaded" etc. Gaming performance will be a scenario that is pretty important for a CPU and wich would not benefit at all from more than 4 cores but scales ok with better thread performance.
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