as in most cases the limiting factor here would probably be that the integrated chipset doesn't have the hardware to support the use of newer protocols
Just to clarify, Linux and Mac drivers for that specific chipset advertise 3.3 support, and I've previously had the game running on a HD3000 chipset on Linux with the GLES3 renderer in the past. It's possible that there are unimplemented 3.3 features, but I don't recall seeing any rendering bugs, so any would most likely be features that Hive Time isn't using, though driver developers seemed to think otherwise when 3.3 support was enabled. Apple maintain and distribute graphics drivers themselves (although don't have a history of providing particularly good or timely OpenGL support), and Intel graphics drivers for Linux are open source and community maintained. That allows driver development to continue beyond Intel's internal driver development lifecycle.
The nice thing about drivers is that although generally not as fast as what embedded firmware can do, the abstraction makes it easier to do things like this where additional APIs are exposed to ask hardware to do stuff that it's capable of but previously wasn't doing and/or to supplement behaviour in software.