Hello Derek,
Yes this statement seems to be spot on:
It is good news that they are at least taking Mac users seriously by fixing the retina as well as other bugs. We hope by the time Java 7u40 is release everything will be at least usable. We are now fairly certain that most Glider performance issues on Mac are possibly related to the currently slow/buggy graphics rendering pipeline in Java 7. All we can do in this regard is wait for them to fix the problems.
Regards,
M.Y. Developers
Retina support in Oracle JDK 1.7.0_40 and above
http://bulenkov.com/2013/06/23/retina-support-in-oracle-jdk-1-7/