Sorry for the delay... I had a hard drive die (loudly) and lost all my work on this and a bunch of other stuff too. Yay for rotating magnetic media! 
So... The direct cause of the crash is this bug, which was seemingly fixed four years ago for every OS except Mac OS, and causes the Java runtime to crash in the absence of OpenGL. The good news is that it isn't too difficult to port that fix to the Mac OS CGLGraphicsConfig.java, rebuild it, and repack rt.jar... The bad news is that it still doesn't work: now it seems to crash a little bit later, while java.awt.Window is evaluating the capabilities of the graphics device, so either I got something wrong in the patching/jar-ing process or there is some other problem as well. 
To be continued...
--
Darius