I don't see why all the hate for these 8 cores, there's plenty of usages for them.
I wouldn't say that there's zero use for them, but it's questionable if it warrants the overhead of having two separate CPU clusters, including separate L2 cache, coherency link, etc. Maybe if the asynchronous domains get put to good use but I'm skeptical.
I think MediaTek does deserve criticism for basically exploiting media coverage of terrible benchmarks like AnTuTu. I'm skeptical that MediaTek would even be making this SoC if these benches didn't exist (ones that take a bunch of awful benches then make it worse by running several instances of them in parallel). Promoting these benchmark numbers makes you part of the problem.
Also, shame on Engadget for report that this is the first true octa-core, unless Exynos 5420 really didn't fix coherency :| They're probably just lifting the more accurate claim of MediaTek's, that it's the first octa-core Cortex-A7.