First of all, I appreciate the fact that you guys now tag your "rant" articles as opinions, so that readers know what to expect.
Now, regarding the benches, I think the single core score is actually quite good, up to par with the best scores of todays flagships.
Multicore score, I suspect is calculated using the Tremont cores, without the Sunny Cove core, because if you divide 1600 points by 4, you get 400 points single core which is right where a Tremont core would score, in relation to the 700+ points single core score of Sunny Cove.
The fact that this is done using VM, it means scores can be even better. The fact that this is an engineering sample, again means this is not final performance.
Adding all up, I think the final multicore score would be in the same range as the new snapdragon 865/8CX which is a great first achievement. It now depends what power consumption it has.