That's it.

The key benefit is that if one thread starts hogging all the CPU time, it doesn't hold up the other threads in the same process. (although it still has the usual effects that you expect from an overloaded cpu)

There is a downside that some modules don't play nice when they could be running in parallel with others. Multithreaded programming is difficult enough without having all the different parts written by different people who never imagined threading would be used.