> I keep hearing this over and over.
Hearing what? That pmap is a drop-in for map giving instant speed gains? That's odd. I've never heard that. Like anything pmap has its tradeoffs.
> poster child for lisp's success
You're conflating "functional programming" with Lisp.
> I think the whole multiple core thing is over blown
That's something that I would probably agree with. However, people tend to focus on that regarding Clojure because it provides more than one model for describing concurrent state changes. People get excited about that I suppose.