As Hugh Daniels put it:

“The problem with trying to child-proof the world, is that it makes people neglect the far more important task of world-proofing the child.

That may be true for the architectural design side of things, but isn't really true for floorplans and is certainly far from true for the SolidWorks part of the story. SolidWorks is still the platform of choice in almost every Mechanical Engineering project I've gotten a glimpse of.

The thing however, and this applies to AutoCAD too in this case, these products are 3D CAD, not graphics software. The mindset to work in one is different to working in the other

I wasn't around when they landed someone on the moon so I can't quite comment on that bit, but I can tell you what I (and the rest of my kind) use the extra processing power for:

Finite Element Analysis (simulating car crashes to make them safer before we crash the dummies in them).
Multibody Dynamics (Simulation of robot behavior saves a ton of money, we can simulate the different options before we build 10 different robots or spend a year figuring out something by trial and error)
Computational Fluid Dynamics (designing cars, jets and pretty much anything in between like windmills and how they affect their surroundings and how efficient they are)
Simulating Complex Systems (designing control schemes for anything from chemical plants, to cruise control to autopilots) Computational Thermodynamics (Working on that tricky global warming thing, or just trying to figure out how to best model and work with various chemicals or proteins)

This is just the uses (that I know of) that more raw power can help out in Mechanical Engineering. I still have to wait about an hour for certain simulations or computations to run and they're not even all that complex yet. The faster these things run (even a few percent increases) can save us tons of time in the long run. And time is money...

Allow me to add a few, since I might know a thing or two about this subject. Some of you might remember Flame, a robot designed at the TU Delft, and being used to further understand human walking (he walks like we do, as opposed to for example Asimo...)

http://www.3me.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=c4fa06f1-b767-4a67-a19e-ea3356400f06&lang=en

The nice people at DBL (Delft Biorobotics Laboratory) have built a next generation robot called TUlip

http://www.dutchrobotics.net
for those interested. That's one I worked on a little, so I might be a little biased in terms of how cool it is :-)

Some more cool robots we saw in China and elsewhere are:

The Cornell Ranger's record for longest distance walked
http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/locomotion_and_robotics/papers/CornellRanger/index.html

or maybe nexi?

http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/mds/overview/overview.html

Or take your pick from a variety in this list:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_view.html?menu_id=261

or this one

http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/project/index.htm

Don't wanna piss away my karma, but don't forget the canceled Falcon 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_5

just thought I'd add that fyi, in case you didn't count it