Are there alternate ways of opening the console in Oblivion

Solution 1:

It's possible that your bAllowConsole setting in oblivion.ini has been disabled; it should be set to 1 to allow you to use the console.

Failing that, there are mods (of course) that add a spell that opens the console, add a ring to open the console, or let you change the console keybinding.

Solution 2:

You share the tilde issue with many developers on the Mac who use parallels, there is a workaround, documented here:

To type a tilde (~) in a windows 7 vm on parallels with a macbook pro you press: SHIFT + §

The § key is the key left of 1 on the number row, shared with a ± sign