Yeah! Don't mind me, having a mental aberation!
The console of ESXi only reflects the number of sockets. So when I increased the vCPU count from 2 cores at 1 core per socket, to 4, it became 4 cores at 2 per socket. The socket count remained at 2, and hence the console still showed :
2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 etc.
Where I had expected to see 4 x.
If I had waited and examined the host summary information, I would have seen it was OK! DOh!