A lot of this goes over my head but does this mean it's not worth waiting for the 2016 Macbook Pro to come out with the Skylake processor?

It has lots more besides AVX512, so I'd consider waiting. These include: lower power, HEVC in hardware, JPEG in hardware, some VP9 in hardware, Better GPU, Faster AES-NI, and Thunderbolt 3.

If Apple supports it in software, it also supports jumping between power-saving states much faster.

No consumer Skylake chips will have AVX-512. It's going to be on server Xeon Skylake chips only ("server Xeon" as opposed to "laptop Xeon"[0]).

[0] http://www.imore.com/intels-xeon-coming-soon-laptops-and-wha...

It's actually even more restricted than that. The E3-1200 V5 series Skylake Xeon's that came out last month are in the "server" line, but do not support AVX-512. I think it's presumed that none of the Greenlow generation will support it, but that the Purley generation that follows will.

So far, my limited experience with Skylake would say that performance gains will be small. If you are buying a Skylake laptop, it should probably be for the increase in battery life rather than hopes of significantly higher speeds.

WoW, this is news to me, what is Skylake without AVX-512?

This is more like a tick from Intel rather then tock.

I don't think they are following the tick tock rythm anymore. Fab process improvements have slowed down recently.