Installing the newest CUDA driver (5.0.17) didn’t seem to help.
As a test, I just replaced the Nvidia kexts with those from ML DP3, and the system booted. However, when running PP CS6, the MPE (unsurprisingly) reverted to software-only, so even without pre-release drivers that’s a non-starter. It does, however, seem to confirm it’s an Nvidia driver issue.
It appears that the barefeats website at least was able to use a GTX-285 in their ML graphic tests (which are interesting in and of themselves):
https://www.barefeats.com/mtlion.html
I’ve also seen other anecdotal reports (ironically, mostly Hackintoshes) of this card working, so I can’t fathom why my system would be having a problem with the card. Premiere ran like butter using it under Lion. The Mac itself is an 8-core 2.26 GHz 4,1 Mac Pro with 24GB of RAM.
EDIT: I found very similar reports on Apple’s discussions, for pre-ML systems:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4083769?tstart=90
I believe I still have the Nvidia GT 120 the Nehalem shipped with somewhere; I’ll try that.