The basic gist is that they don’t play well together out of the box. You can make them work if you’re willing to do a bit of fiddling and if you’re not afraid of the OS X command line.
The first problem is that Apple decided that the new MBA SuperDrives should only be used in MacBooks that didn’t come with a factory-installed optical drive. You’ll actually encounter two different issues
The first has to do with whether the MBP will actually recognize the drive. You can solve that issue by following the instructions at Use the Apple external SuperDrive on (almost) any Mac. In a nutshell, you need to edit /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist and set the empty element to mbasd=1. The file should now look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>mbasd=1</string>
</dict>
</plist>
If your version of the file already has text between <string> and </string>, insert a space after the existing text, then insert mbasd=1.
and the other has to do with whether you can use it to play a DVD.