I mildly disagree - depending on your definition of "typical app". Most applications have much greater use of multi-processing and concurrent cross-thread (or cross-process) communication. Compilers, aside from high-level parallelism across modules, tend to be quite single-threaded applications.
If you're solely interested in single-core performance, then I would agree that they are a good stress test, but I think for a processor that is being sold on it's parallelism, they are not a great benchmark.
If you're solely interested in single-core performance, then I would agree that they are a good stress test, but I think for a processor that is being sold on it's parallelism, they are not a great benchmark.