Nono, we're really talking before the Mac Pro. During the PowerPC days, maaaaybe very early Intel but not really. Even the lowest end Mac Mini came with a discrete GPU back then, and Apple would advertise it with gaming benchmarks.
A Power Mac G4 with a decent GPU back then was not a bad deal either. The Power Mac started at what... I think I remember them going as low as $1300?
Basically when the iPhone shipped Apple really stopped caring, and that was around the same time Intel happened.
Edit: And for the record, I don't think the Mac Pro was a bad choice either up until something like the 3,1. It was still cheaper than a comparable PC, and gaming PCs were a lot more expensive than they are today. The GPU PSU situation wasn't a problem yet. But Apple's software focus had already started to move away.
Apple was price-competitive up to the 4,1 Mac Pro, but it was a bit late with that revision... and we saw how they slipped after that. But they were always price-competing with workstations. Even the 6,1 was price-competitive when it hit, but with the caveat that if you absolutely needed something more beefy or expandable, it simply couldn't compete in those areas. The problem with Apple has never really been that they can't put something out that's close, it's that they don't modulate their prices over time, compounded by erratic release schedules. The G4s and G5s all stomped comparable Intel offerings when they were initially released, too... and then that advantage quickly disappeared.
The reality is Apple has *never* had someone who really cares about games, and probably actually plays them a lot. The whole idea of "green felt and lawn games = gaming" that hit with Game Center, and the fact that Game Center could have been awesome but languished, is point enough. Even on iOS Apple mostly just seems interested in games in that they're the app category that makes real sustainable money. They had their chance to start challenging the big three game console makers with the Apple TV, but they didn't.
Especially now, I don't see Apple ever being able to leverage gaming to grow their business. You can get more power for cheaper, and always have been, the only difference now is there's more of a price differential than historically. People have been asking for the xMac for years, and it's never come, and now that desktops are an ever-shrinking part of their lineup I don't see that changing, even if they could cheap it by, say, making a Mac Pro enclosure with a single MXM-style GPU and an i7 instead of a Xeon.
I definitely wish Apple had one or two guys over there in a position they could make the relatively small changes that would at least make Mac gaming more pleasant, especially now with eGPUs (in other words offloading a lot of the stuff they don't want to deal with in relation to games.) But they just don't.
