Yeah, remember when Tiger came out and the iBooks couldn't support certain animation? I have a feeling something similar is going to happen with the macbooks.
Taken from a Macuser (UK) review from March 2006:
We asked Tom Boger, Apple's vice-president of desktop product marketing, why the company had changed its position. His answer was that the GMA950 was a huge improvement on previous integrated graphics chips and enabled the mini to run Core Image, which lets it do clever things, such as perform the ripple effect in Tiger's Dashboard and display the Front Row interface in all its glory. While the mini isn't up to the job of playing the most demanding games, the GMA950 is clearly significantly more powerful than the ATI Radeon 9200 installed in the G4 mini. The very fact that the mini now supports Core Image is a signal of the improvement in its graphics performance and that the move to integrated graphics isn't a retrograde step.
Given that was just over a year ago and that Leopard was originally due out now, I don't think Apple would be working on a GUI that excludes so many OS X users - particularly considering how many MBs the company has shifted. But hey! I'm not running the company, so what do I know?
Core Animation in Leopard - for instance - which I think is going to be one of the more eye-candy features of Leopard, is compatible with any Core Image-ready machine, which the MB certainly is. What's important in CA is whether the machine has more than one core; one core does the animation while the other runs the app.
Most of the arguments why Leopard won't run on MBs (e.g. see the recent thread), seems to be based on an antipathy to the GMA 950 or integrated graphics generally, rather than first-hand reports or evidence.
You could be perfectly correct, of course. Following WWDC, we should hear more first hand reports and get a better picture.