What newer language?
In my opinion
java /c#/ruby/python share little few semantics with c(other then some basic types).
I keep reading this claim in Erlang articles, and I wonder why it continues to be made. Its obviously false for the theoretical reason of the limited amount of parallelism in a problem you just stated. It is empirically false on every benchmark I've seen on a real-world architecture (i.e. actual multicore, with actual memory and IO, as opposed to virtual processes). What's strange is that the OP seems to be completely aware of this, but still leads the article with the claim in bold letters before qualifying it later on.
To my mind, Erlang is pretty cool as it is, even before a discussion of multicore performance. But I guess if you "have been waiting 20 years for this to happen, and now it’s payback time" (payback for what?) you are OK with a bit of hyperbole.
Erlangs forte is in a very specific kind of system. If your problem is
* Stateful * Concurrent * State has to "act on its own" * Distributed over multiple machines
Then Erlang is a nice tool for the job.
The language is not particularly old. Note you are not allowed to call a language old if the "newer" language is based on C or its semantics :)