I find soft-wrapping code pretty tedious, so even with huge screens IMHO indeed breaking around 80-100 (accounting also for indentation) is nice.

BTW I recently go a 24" screen (I was all about laptops, turns out I was torturing myself...) and I can easily fit 3 columns in Emacs, with a large-ish point size (238 chars across the monitor, DejaVu Sans Mono). If it's not a preference thing, and assuming (corrected-to-)fine eyesight, shouldn't 43" be capable of like 8x2 easily?