Also, SSE4 had me worried, 'cause the main new feature penryn would have was that and I thought present core 2 processors would
loose support from future apps, especially games.
The reason for this fear was that some games refused to work on my PII due to lack of SSE support.

I was afraid this would happen with core 2 also. I was wrong.
The reason is given below.:sun:
"If I were to pick on Vantage for lacking a feature, it would be SSE4 support. I was given two reasons for it's lack of inclusion. First is development time. As mentioned earlier, development time is twice what was originally expected, so they couldn't afford to include SSE4 support if they wanted to. The main reason given though, is because that's a feature available on Intel processors only, and they didn't want to give Intel a big advantage for a feature not available on AMD processors."
Source :
Link
I would not pick on Vantage! No, sir!

Now, if only Intel has support for this then I am sure most future apps and games would not make it a mandatory requirement.
Thank God for AMD not supporting this!