You can actually spoof the MAC to with Packet Builder. Its actually a really good program to learn with and you do seem to know some of the basics not as previously thought. Its also very good to test you IDS with.

You can set it to use the real MAC and send with a spoofed IP. This is good for testing certain things too. I use it a lot to test snort, and I tested things similar to you and I built a preporcessor for snort that monitors for spoofed IP's. You can send a single packets too, which you cant really do with telnet so if your testing certain ports this is great.

Oh and ping is icmp.