Yeah, that's what I figured -- some sort of driver thing, or something with OpenGL, then. Or just the OS being slightly messed up, is even possible. I know it's not supposed to happen with Macs, but it can. I'd figure there could be some sort of update for that.
I have the i5 model (I think 15") of macbook pro from mid-2010, and it works fine for me. I'd also had it running on two much older macbooks (one from about 3 years ago, which did decently, and one stupid little white one that I forget the model number of, running Leopard on hardware from even further back -- it was a stutter-fest, but worked), so it really shouldn't be any sort of fundamental incompatibility with that machine. Just... something's not right in terms of drivers or opengl or something along those lines.
That's progress, at least!