Its a big divide between hardware vendors and software vendors. The hardware vendors are trying their hardest to out do each other with more cores while the software vendors are trying to maintain there revenue stream against the mass migration to vitualization.
It has come to the point were you have to build a servers(well vm host) around licensing cost. We have even had to pay extra for IBM blades with JUST 4 cores (two sockets with dual core cpu's) so we stay under the enterprise licensing cost for software like Oracle and Lotus Notes.
We tell the vendors every time they come in that if they remove the 4 core blades as planned over the next few cycles that we will not be refreshing hardware, which will cost them money. Otherwise a $10,000 hardware life cycle change is going to cost us $100,000 - $200,000 MORE in software licensing
The two sides need to get together, because rather then being in lock step they are on diverging paths. The software vendors especially need to get off their high horse an accept virtual core counts as oppose to the number of total cores the entire vm host has. If i build a 16 core VM monster to host a dozen servers and only give the Virtual Oracle server 4 cores that should be acceptable. Currently its not, and the software vendors want us to pay for all 16 cores on the physical hardware underneath that VM which then forces you in the Enterprise level software license which can be 10x as expensive.