Well, yes and no. A games developer will do whatever they can to get realistic fluid simulation, for example. People already use more compute power for fog and smoke in games than was used on the weather 20 years ago...

Remember history. Anything people could do on the "mainframe", they eventually wanted to on the desktop.

I will like to believe that the Desktop software will move towards parallelism, may not be to the same extent as of HPC, but in a similar direction in the sense that it will certainly go away from strictly single core approach. It won't be easy, e.g. none of the web browsers today fully exploits all cores of a box. But, it will be fun to watch.

Off topic: I'm in your fan club, :) due to your "Hack the planet" blog http://wmf.editthispage.com since Dec. 1999.