I have two MacBook Pros (15" mid-2007 and 13" mid 2009) and they both work perfectly fine so I can confirm that they last more than two years
It depends on what you're going to be playing. For older games (2+ years old) and core 2 duo should be fine, but for more modern stuff you should stick with the i5. For those games you mentioned, a C2D will work. As for the graphics cards, talk to somebody else about that one.
Why not get a MacBook Air? Light weight, portable and super fast SSDs. I would strongly suggest an air, unless your getting into programming or heavy gaming.
I was thinking about an air, but tbqh, I like my technology to have a bit of weight and size to it. And I love the unobody design of the MBP. <3 EDIT: Score. Someone on Craigslist is selling me their 2011 MBP 13" for $550 since he upgraded to the 15"
Using a 2009 13" Macbook Pro(2.26Ghz C2D). Runs great, although it's been upgraded to 8GB Ram and 80GB SSD+1TB HDD. As a point of reference, at one time I was playing Mondern Warfare 2 on it. I don't remember the settings, but it only got laggy on the "busy screen, lots of action" parts. Im not a gamer though, so... I do know the Core-i CPU's are significantly faster at encoding audio/video, because of new instruction sets. Mine takes 10 minutes to convert a 40 minute tv show in AVI to MP4.
