I can confirm that I do care about native res as a mac user and heavy gamer (but I mostly end up gaming on windows for obvious reasons).
Scaling has never failed to look utterly terrible for me. Scaling from eg 1920x1080 -> 2880x1800 looks utterly awful, even on a 15" display. It's not so bad on 3D rendered titles for the 3D content, but for 2D elements such as the GUI it's awful.