Except we've been waiting how many years for actual multicore support and ad-hoc polymorphism (or anything approaching it)...?

No, OCaml really isn't a language where things move forward; quite the opposite.

Also, if you had actually written any Haskell code you'd know it's not about eliminating any side effects, it's about denoting them in the type system. Your comment reeks of someone who hasn't actually used either of these languages.