For 3.3+ I ended up using a tweaked version of Eric's patch - I kept the general test structure, but used the behavioural test I had created (i.e. does updating the initially read-only source file affect a subsequent bytecode only import?), as well as the simple rule of just always making the cached files writable by the owning user.
On 3.3+, this permissions tweak occurs regardless of OS, because I didn't think it was worth the runtime hit to make it OS specific (whereas the use of the C preprocessor previously made that not an issue).