On my laptop, panorama is mostly unusable because the zoom animation is not smooth *most of the time*. The hardware is certainly not the latest (Intel C2D 2.2Ghz with X3100 graphics) but still very common. I would not file this bug if the performance was always bad. Thing is, if I open panorama, zoom into a tab, open panorama again, zoom into that tab again and repeat 3-4 times the animation becomes very smooth. I don't know what happens here but it indicates that my hardware is fast enough, generally.

Btw, what really happens the first time I zoom into a tab is that the tab zooms mostly fine until half-way, then stops for what feels like a second and then jumps to full view.

I just had a chance to try this on my home desktop machine (C2D 2.4Ghz, GeForce 7950) and it's not much better. The animation still gets "stuck" around half-way. Definitely not a hardware problem.