[TheDopp]

I would like to first state that running something in a virtual machine is in no way emulating a port. All of the driver issues in macs are eliminated by running it in a virtual machine because of the fact that you are using windows drivers at that point, and you are effectively using DirectX.

Macintosh HAS no directX. Microsoft will never allow that to happen. The only option for them is to use OpenGL, which sucks shit for high-end (post-2006) gaming at this point in time.

Second, Cider wouldn't solve the problems for non-intel macs, which is REALLY the only issue here. Why would they waste all of this effort to port something just to save people the five to ten minutes rebooting into windows?

Cider also can't handle middleware. So I hope you can enjoy playing Half Life 2 without physics.

Emulation isn't part of the discussion - just as new games to the Mac platform are released as Intel only, there's no reason to think Valve would do any different if releasing theirs (though I don't doubt they'd release older Mac ports from other developers that work for the old platform as well as new). So for the sake of discussion running TF2 on XP in Parallels is the extreme when talking overhead for running the game in OSX via a virtualization wrapper (CrossOver or Cider - the same tech used in WINE).

And Cider doesn't 'handle' middleware, true, because it doesn't need to; the example you used isn't because it's a technology that's missing, it's licensing. Furthering the example, Valve would (probably) have to get a new license from Havok for Half-Life 2 for releases on Macs. That's money and it's really in Valve's court if they want to front the money for a (much) smaller market of gamers.

To the bit about them saving people 5-10 minutes to reboot: My XP partition is only used to play games. I don't have a chat client, IRC client, etc installed. I could install those programs, but I could also just forget I have OSX and do everything in Windows. Having a Steam client native on OSX lets me use the OS I want to use, and gives me the option of Gaming in it as well (or idling in TF2 and getting actual work done while that happens), and for Valve that means I spend more money on games since it's no longer an inconvenience to play. And that's not even taking into consideration the hordes of social/casual gamers that would have an app store to find games they couldn't otherwise get as they don't even know what bootcamp is (e.g. my parents).

tl;dr - Hooray Steam on macs