Sorry, a bit of hyperbole on my part. I was alluding to the "Vista Capable" days, when machines barely able to run XP were touted by their manufacturers as "Vista Capable", even though they knew very well that the new OS had much higher requirements than XP. Core Solo CPUs were particularly bad at running any Windows OS, and were featured in many of those machines.
My point being, even a kludgy setup like that was more tolerable than OS X 10.7 and up (again, hyperbole, but close enough to the truth in my case).