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Yup - benchmarks (the latest 3DMark for example) and heavy number crunching utilities (like SETI) will make use of dual core processors and in theory will run twice as fast as a single core (3D Mark only really in the CPU physics tests.
Games are a different story however and require multithreading support in order to take advantage of the second core (only a handful really do at the moment - the Quake IV and Doom 3 engine, Oblivion).
Even without multithreaded support you can still feel the benefits of having 2 physical cores - switching between applications, alt-tabbing out of games etc - there will always be some processing power in reserve to handle these other tasks.
Applications which are not dual core optimised tend to only tie up 50% load form each core, meaning that there is an awful lot of headroom for doing other things, even with one CPU hungry app crunching away.
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