After a frustrating series of months trying to get AO working in wine post-awesomium patch, I decided to try it in parallels. I had previously tried AO in vmware and it was unplayable, but currently run build 6 of parallels, and I'm happy to report that AO runs perfectly fine.

Here are some specs, which may or may not help you judge whether this is a good idea for yourself.

MBP Specs:
CPU: 2.53 intel core 2 duo
RAM: 8 gigs
HD: 128gb SSD
Video Card: NVIDIA GEFORCE 9400m

My parallels specs:
OS: Windows XP Pro
CPU: 1 core
RAM: 1 gb
Video card: works both with the parallels driver and the adapter. Adapter may run a little faster.

Perhaps it's also worth mentioning that I run parallels in full screen mode on its own dedicated OS X space, and that AO would only run full screen for me. If I tried windows mode, it simply crashed without ever getting to the AO loading logo. Though this doesn't really matter much, since I can always switch mac OS spaces if I want to multi task.

If you've been fiddling with trying to get it running in wine, I'm getting at least as good, if not better performance running it in parallels, and with much less trouble.

I hope this helps all 2 of you out there who try playing on a mac.