Yes, me too. The clock speeds are quite a bit lower on a similarly priced machine from last year. I know the Nahalem architecture is supposed to be much faster and each core is hyperthreaded (can run 2 simultaneous threads). But I wonder how much (if any) faster these machines will really be for DAW processing performance of plugins which I believe is still tied to a single core per plugin for most apps and hence still affected most by clock speed not necessarily core count.
Basically what I'm wondering is will the $3200 price point machine (2.26 GHz 8core) actually perform worse than the old $3200 price point machine (2.8 GHz 8 core). I guess time, reviews, and forums will tell.