Depends....
If the people who have answered do not know:
* when you intend to upgrade again
* your budget
* type of gaming and type of "general activities"
then they gave you the wrong answer.
SSD?!? why? Good god, just, why?!? If you have more money than Bill Gate's clone-son, then sure, why not. But otherwise.....
a $950+ quad core, or a Hot Deals $50 slow quad core (or a Hot Deals screaming fast $50 dual core)??? edit: or any of several dozen choices in between
It just depends. Any inexpensive dual/quad core and middle-of-the-line video card will probably serve you well (do not know your demands), but if you have deep pockets and want the best....
You probably haven't owned a SSD yet.
In my experiences with a dual core + SSD, I believe an SSD finally justifies a quad core for non-multithreaded apps. There is nowhere clearer than at Windows startup - on a dual core, I now get lag on startup not because I am random IO limited (which is in a hard drive), but I am actually CPU limited (both cores pegged at 100% for about 20 seconds). It's quite easy to verify this when you look at task manager and see the CPU usage is 100%, and disk queue lengths in resource manager are below 1. Similar examples occur during actual computer use, especially working with multiple heavy applications (Adobe suite, CAD/CAM, 3d modeling, scientific, video). If you don't work with multiple heavy applications and use just one (i.e gaming), then it depends on the game - you might be fine with a dual core and a regular hard drive, or you might not.
PS I sure wished I went for quad core (have a E8400 instead, which is still good) when I was doing After Effects and genetic algorithm prediction of physical and financial data. It would also have been helpful when I was juggling Photoshop, 3ds max, blender (darn export tools), 2 game instances, one game editor, and miscellaneous odds and ends. Anyways, it depends on your usage case.