Well i decided to test this myself using a ps2 game called Kingdom Hearts re:chain Of Memories which i consider to be a pretty heavy usage game. Under the PCSX2 emulator port for Mac and the results were not good... It lagged, sound was choppy and the game was too slow to be playable. these are the results i expected as people play these on desktops with quad core and all sorts.
Instead i got the windows version to run under Crossover and got better results, but still they were unplayable. I almost gave up trying but then i thought i would try the windows version under Bootcamp. Unfortunately i don't have it installed, I only have a Windows 7 Virtual Machine. I was thinking the results would be very poor under such an environment but tried anyway. And to my amazement after some tweaking i got the game to run at a playable speed in fullscreen under an external display with 1080p resolution.
Heres a video to show the results:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQDQWifb9Ow
After further checking I discovered I only gave my virtual machine 1 CPU core to use and only 733MB of RAM! So with those results from only one core AND in a virtual machine i think this game and the emulator will be close to/if not perfect under Bootcamp!
I hope some other people who wondered this has found the post helpful.
Kris
EDIT: Forgot to mention my model is the 13" base model with 4GB RAM! Even more amazing.