I thought that I would relate my experience here. I was prompted by the question, Can I program for Arduino without having a real board?, to try to use a real emulator, such as QEMU, as suggested by zmo, in a comment to Anindo Ghosh's answer.
I had similar issues and I finally got this working last night, on OS X 10.8.5 with QEMU v2.2.0, after working on/off for two weeks.
