Game developer Valve recently announced the launch of its Mac client for Steam, a digital distribution service for gamers. Going by the initial reports from the CNET lab, Steam’s new Mac version is quite similar to the Windows version of the service and almost as seamless too.

Also available at the Steam launch is two games Torchlight and Portal – the latter being available as a free download till May 24.

For those unfamiliar with Steam, it is basically like an iTunes Store for games, with the additional advantage of having more social features and demos of a number of games. The Steam creator, Valve, is the developer of games like Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and Half Life.

Meanwhile, from a testing perspective, the Mac client for Steam was tested by the CNET lab on four Macs, namely: the 13-inch MacBook Pro with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo; the 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2.66GHz Core i7; the 27-inch iMac with 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo; and the 27-inch iMac with 2.8GHz Core i7.

After using the same Steam account on all four Mac systems, the CNET lab reported that games could be easily installed and launched. The reports also said that Valve’s not-so-hyped SteamWorks feature, which stores users’ game files with their account so that they can be easily accessed from different systems, also worked satisfactorily well.