Today's OS's can use 256 cores very well. We're still a few years out from seeing standard desktop/laptop/netbook/phones with 256 cores (not counting a gpu with say 64 dedicated cores). And in the server space while there's a number of options for 128/256 core machines most datacenter designers have decided that 256 is enough of cores for a single point of failure and it's better to scale out than scale up past that, at least until a 256 core box costs about what a 4 core does now...
It's the apps that need to be better at spreading their work out in a parallel way. There are all kinds of core affinity and priority and syncronization mechanisms for them to use to do it. Why would a media transcoder app for example be geared to about 8 cores for some inexplicable reason? Not sure where your dvd burning example was going, that's all io bound and takes only a small fraction of a single core...
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