macs aren't made for gaming!
You can play games on them though. Especially console ports like the CoD series.
I wouldn't say that PCs have stabilized at the hardware level, hardware is always ever-increasing. But what the average person uses a PC for hasn't changed much in the last decade or so. There was a time when you couldn't run the latest anything (including the OS) without lag if you didn't upgrade every two years or so. Which became five years. And then laptops began outselling desktops. Mini-PCs (popularized by Apple) with laptop hardware became fashionable. Netbooks based on decade-old hardware (miniaturized) had their 15 minutes. Finally smart phones and tablets have kind of cannibalized the market. People obsess over new CPUs but unless you are rendering and running benchmarks, it's not easy to notice.
Now, if you wanted to play the latest PC games, you still had to follow the upgrade cycle... Until the 360 came out. The original Xbox stole PC gamers away, and 360 ensured they never came back. It had a GPU that was ahead of it's time upon release (literally, the slightly-more-powerful PC variant came out a month later and cost nearly $1k!). Because of the 360/PS3 and also the success of the antiquated-upon-release Wii, PC games have been stuck in limbo. The majority of PC games are console ports and many of them are still DX9 because that's what the console hardware is designed for.
It makes more commercial sense to develop a console game and port it with minor (if any) enhancements to the PC (or Mac) where sales will be low and piracy will be high.
There are elitest gamers who believe gaming laptops are a rip-off because they are a generation or more behind the latest PC GPUs. But there are also rational people who realize that a desktop takes up space and has a ton of wires. And even those home theater PCs can't handle the powerful cards, winding up inferior to gaming laptops. Laptop gaming battery life might stink, but they are still portable. Saw some guy on the GoG Witcher 2 forum tell a gamer with the latest laptop GPU that it was only good for light media applications, the same thing they used to say about Intel cards. An elitist jerk.
That's the problem, the elitist attitudes persist. People are still stuck in the past and believe they need to upgrade to the latest and most expensive hardware to play the latest games which are often console ports. It's diminishing returns. Even the Witcher 2 on uber sampling has a subtle difference compared with it off (but off has like 3-4x the fps).
Macs might not be designed for games, but they can play games. Mac ports and PC games work via the usual methods (boot camp, parallels, wine, cider, etc.)
And the 2-year-old integrated 320m coupled with a now-ancient core 2 duo can best the latest Intel graphics because Intel graphics still suck and it is a shame Apple went with them again (they kind of had to though, no thanks to Intel). My wife has my former 13" Macbook Pro with a 320m and it plays Skyrim looking nicer than 360/PS3. It's an integrated card from two years ago, but the shared memory bandwidth is similar to 360/PS3 and the overall power of the GPU is nearly the same in most cases. Even with a PC/Mac OS overhead (thanks to the extra RAM). So technically, if there is a console version then it should run with similar quality. Used to be my PC and I got the DX9 version of Metro 2033 running at a 25-30 fps framerate with the in-game settings and some other tweaks. CoD Black Ops and MW3 on low is, in all honesty, pretty much PS3 quality. It's a shame that Intel needs shadows off though. It's a shame Apple had to use them again.
Sorry for the tl;dr, but my point is that all modern macs (even the Intels) can play modern games if there is a console version, at least at console quality. Therefore they can indeed play games that are not only playable but also look good. They look better on better hardware, but that doesn't matter to normal people. My wife's 320m can run Witcher 2 @ low-res (720x480) with mostly the lowest details (a couple turned up) and it is very playable, mostly 25-30 in fraps. And that's among the most demanding of games. Even in low detail and low-res, it still looks great. Not like the low detail modes of games of yesteryear where the models and lighting and textures turned to poo. Again, the low mode of CoD looks similar to the console versions. Gamespot did a comparison vid of the Wii CoD:Black Ops compared with the PC version on low to show how inferior the Wii version looked to the 'ridiculous' low settings on the PC. Except if they did the comparison with PC on low next to PS3/360, nobody would see a difference. Because consoles are ancient now and PC games are behind as a result (for the most part).
