Repeat after me: Apple will never even attempt to compete in the gaming market.
They won't just be uncompetitive. I'm saying they're never going to even bother trying.
On the other hand, no computer builder is going to even approach the gaming performance per dollar of homebrew systems. Apple can't compete there no matter what, but neither can Dell or any other company for that matter. There's a limit to how good of a graphics card you can configure in any given Dell machine, and to get the highest end ones, you have to go for an XPS tower, which commands a very high price.
Booting into Windows on a Mac and using that to play Windows games is not Apple being competitive in the gaming market. That's just further driving the point home that the Mac OS is not, and never will be, a gamer's OS. There will never be enough games available for it, the hardware that can run OS X will never be powerful enough to run those games particularly well, and those games that do come out will be released several months late at the original retail price, after the Windows version dropped in price.
Besides, gamers will never, I repeat, never take Macs seriously. But it's clear that Apple doesn't want their business. Most gamers don't take any computer builder seriously, and Apple is especially bad because they'd be paying more than normal for an OS they'll never use and losing upgrade potential in the process.
So, games for OS X. There will always be a few, and they'll run much better now thanks to the Intel switch. But that very switch will prevent OS X gaming from ever being a serious proposition. Those who want to game a lot will just get a Windows machine, or if they do have a Mac, they'll boot into Windows all the time anyway. Those who don't want to game a lot will still have some options, and they'll actually run at a playable framerate now (unlike the PPC days, when you needed a Power Mac G5 just to get lag-free gameplay).
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