Clock speed determines how many calculations your processor can handle at once (or, how fast it can perform those calculations)...bus speed determines how fast your process can deal with input and output...
Now, for some applications, being able to do complex calculations very quickly is important...this would apply to say, an engineering or architectural program, which is where quad-cores become very handy...games also need this to do things like load a large map quickly...
Some applications require your computer to do many calculations very quickly, and this is where bus speed becomes important...if your game needs to keep track of the physics state for thousands of individual elements, that not only requires a power processor but also a good bus speed...
Up to this point, bus speed is usually not an issue as people find their gaming capabilities limited more by clock speed and the fact that games are not multi-threaded...if a computer game designer knows they only have one core to work with, then that severely limits what they'll do with the game and forces them to write efficient programming (in theory)...
However, if a programmer knows they have 2 or 4 cores to work with, then they don't have the same incentive to be efficient and there's nothing holding them back...for example, SC in sins will go right through objects, including planets...this was probably done because having to do pathfinding for hundreds of SC as they navigate around a planet would have required significantly more processing power, and so the game was designed otherwise...
Once games are multi-threaded, the limiting factor in processors will no longer be clock speed, but bus speed...with the advent of abundant processing power, there seems to be a growing trend in programming to rely on brute force methods instead of efficiency...to what extent this trend is occurring in PC games I'm not sure, but given the obvious lack of effort in many other areas, I wouldn't be surprised if gaming is victim to this trend...
If I'm a consumer choosing between a 2.0 GHz quad-core and a 2.8 GHz dual-core, I'm probably going to go with the quad-core...not only does it actually have more processing power but it's probably cheaper since the quality of each individual core is much less...unfortunately, that means the bus-speed of each core is probably less...
Even if it were the same, most games up till now have been designed for one core...multi-threading easily would allow a game to utilize four times more processing power...however, the bus speed still remains the same, which is where I see a potential problem...people go out and buy a cheap quad-core because they think its better only to find themselves limited by a different variable...
I don't know the specs of the Intel i7 but if they were designed for servers then their bus speed is probably twice that of most processors...normally I think processors have bus speeds of around 33 MHz so that Intel i7 is probably at 66 MHz...
The issue really isn't the hardware as much as it is consumer's tendencies and understanding of products as well as programmers being lazy and using brute force...
As for silicon technology, miniaturization is hitting its limits...a big limiting factor is "electronic noise" that forces smaller silicon designs to use significantly larger amounts of energy (obviously heat then becomes a big issue)...I don't know much about graphene but if it is a semi-conductor that conducts well at room temperature, then it could very well replace silicon...this is just a guess, but if it is found to be superior to silicon, I would imagine it is because it dissipates heat better...
I know they are working on more "biological" types of processing that try to imitate neural connections...unfortunately from what I've read, those designs only increase energy efficiency and excel at abstract applications like facial recognition...so far AFAIK they won't help with precision applications like a physics engine for a game 