Microsoft's software can't take x86 beyond some minor hyperthreading on two cores without major reworking ...
That's such bullcrap.
The NT kernel scales to 32 processors on 32-bit architectures, and 64-processors on 64-bit architectures. As of Win2k3 it supports NUMA, SMT, and memory architectures with relaxed ordering.
The kernel is reentrant, it can be running on any or all of the CPUs in the machine at the same time. Interrupts can be fielded on any processor (depending on the hardware).
It has run on Alpha and MIPS, and continues to run on x86, x86-64, Itanium, and PowerPC (which means it could run quite easily on Cell PUs).