ok a few quick answers.
1. Intel for the past 5 years have been full of crap and unfortunately you've fallen victim to their brainwashing. HIGH FREQUENCY IS NOT ALL IMPORTANT. the Core 2 Duo marks Intel's realisation of that fact, while the clock speed may not be all that high it is highly efficient and does far more at a lower clock speed. even if it were only a single core it is still more powerful than a Pentium 4, the fact that it is dual core is just a bonus.
2. the memory latencies are fairly irrelevant to an Intel processor using their Netburst technology. this is because the transfers between the processor>memory controller>memory already have a high latency so a little higher latency on memory is insignificant. what does matter more so is the frequency of that memory. this can help to overcome the problems caused by a high latency memory controller. therefore you should try for higher frequency memory rather than lower latency.