I play on a Mac too, using WASD or the arrow keys for panning the camera around is just the right speed for me. Did you try using the keyboard? You can also pan the camera with right-click+drag if you happen to have a Magic Mouse or any two buttons mouse.
As it turns out, I don't experience this problem at all on my Macbook Pro Retina 2013 running Mavericks, if that can be any help.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for bringing up a known issue.
The game is pretty fast overrall, panning the map around or zooming is generally fast and smooth. But all interaction with the UI is super sluggish and laggy, especially with special buildings (research center, hacker, etc). Tooltips take ages to appear and some UI elements stack upon each other when clicking around too much. The game is noticeably smoother after victory using the "map" mode to look around the map. Here are my specs: Windows 7 64bits Intel Core i5 M450 2.