Seeing as you mentioned it..
I ran Google Earth on my work PC which contains a less than inspiring 82945G chipset. It needs to be run in DirectX in safe mode to avoid some graphics corruption, and the drivers aren't fantastic (Windows 7, but WDDM 1.0). Nevertheless, it works and the framerate is usable albeit jumpy rather than smooth.
HD does work, providing you have the right chipset, the right driver (i.e. Windows - forget it in anything else) and the right software. That's exactly the same as ATI and Nvidia, though - they'll do a full decode, but only for certain codecs.
My Thinkpad X61 has a somewhat better X3100 which manages to run some (older) 3D games quite well.
Don't get me wrong, my main system has an 8800GTX and a 7600GT; an upgrade will no doubt be an ATI 5+ series when they die. For work, I really don't mind the Intel chipsets, though.