It's a real shame that when I want to play a game on my MacBook Pro I am met at every turn with a new obstacle. These machines have decent power, but maybe they belie their true gaming prowess. All I know is that I am disappointed, especially with the lack of support from third party developers. 

If you want to play PC games, don't get a mac.

@Mikemcn said:

If you want to play PC games, don't get a mac.

Yeah, it is kinda the unspoken compromise when you buy a mac but they have been getting better in the past few years, more games support mac but don't compare to PC.

And doesn't steam work with Mac? Try that, you could at least play some Valve games.

what mikemcn said, check out steam see if those games work. you have to look around to find a game that works on macs, i guess.

OS X is garbage for games even with Steam support. You need to run Windows really, the framerates compared to the OS X versions of games is always much better in Windows pretty much. There's very few exceptions to this.
 
Of course it's fine for simple 2D and low level 3D games (older games) but when you're playing a newer title you'll want every bit of FPS you can get, especially on laptop graphics, for that reason you should boot camp Windows.

Well, truth be told, I played Portal 2 in my macbook pro 13" and it was fine. some jitters here and there but overall it was fine.

@Entmoot said:

It's a real shame that when I want to play a game on my MacBook Pro I am met at every turn with a new obstacle. These machines have decent power, but maybe they belie their true gaming prowess. All I know is that I am disappointed, especially with the lack of support from third party developers.

Why are you crying about not being able to play games? You bought a Mac. What did you expect?

If you want to play PC games, don't get a mac.

They don't have the game library of PCs but do have Blizzard games, the Civilization series, and a good library of (very) casual games and iOS ports on the Mac App store.  Just don't expect to play the most recent shooters and adventure games without some type of windows installation.