I've got a 4 year old MBP that does just fine.
Yes the dedicated graphics card is nice, but only really necessary for 3D. You may end up doing some 3D modeling though.
You can and should run windows on your mac. They've made it super easy to run two OS's on macs.
As a matter of fact, i've got OSX 10.6, Win 7, Win XP, and Ubuntu Linux 10.10 all on my MBP.
Quad boot baby.