the way i understood the cell would work was that it has 16? cores and they all connect up to a distribution circuit. if they did it in a certian way and assigned certian tasks to each core, say a gravity engine to one core and a friction one to another or an enviroment one and a physical objects one, they would have a core that was highly optimized and be able to run at a low clock with low power but still have an encredible performance output if software programming was done right.
in the case of the PS2, developers had a lot of trouble with programming at first because their code needed to be highly optimized to get good performance. Sony took the gamble and won, and id be more than will to bet that they would do it agian if they trained programmers to code for Cell.
there is my two cents, but dont spend it all at once