This is somewhat of an aside, but the fastest terminal emulator I've ever used is rxvt-unicode. I don't even know if it utilizes the GPU (doubt it), but damn is it snappy. Try it out if you're on GNU / Linux.
This nice study goes into nicely thought out detail to compare speed of emulators, I recommend it. Urxvt is not so blazing fast at latency, and it manages great scrolling speed by dropping content. (It's my current emulator of choice though !)
Does it drop it or simply not show it? Will scrolling back through history display the "dropped" content? If so I'm fine with that, it's annoying when you finally finish a task and pipe the results to a file just to find the bottleneck slowing you down was display refreshes.
No idea, I've never tried to install it on a MBP. When it comes to Apple hardware, I tend to stick to macOS. It's Unix enough for me and while I prefer something like awesomewm, I'm willing to accept the limitations of the desktop environment and go about my day.
Linux desktop in 2018 is incredible though. On my desktop, I'm running an RX 580 on AMD's open source drivers and I can play modern Windows games at >= 60fps using WINE + dxvk. Steam is even officially supporting it now. Just wait 2-3 years and GNU / Linux will be the way to go.
I'm the same way in general, I prefer "past of least friction" for my OS and IDE and programming languages etc. I'm using Mac OS X right now. (They may have changed the OS's name by now.) But I also like new and shiny novelties. Sometimes it's nice to configure Arch Linux with dwm and all sorts of stuff like that.
Btw I'm big fan of your games, like Link to the Past! 16-bit era was best era.
