I run emacs -nw --daemon, but on OS X it's noticeably slower (running in iTerm, tmux) than it is on Linux. It's not what I would call snappy at all tbh. I've checked it's not my config. I wonder how come?
I run emacs-plus macOS variant, which one are you running?
brew install emacs
brew install emacs --HEAD
brew install emacs --with-cocoa --with-imagemagick@6 --HEAD
brew install emacs --with-librsvg --with-cocoa --with-imagemagick@6 --HEAD
brew install emacs --with-gnutls --with-librsvg --with-
cocoa --with-imagemagick@6 --HEAD
brew install emacs --devel --with-cocoa --with-gnutls --with-librsvg --with-imagemagick
brew install emacs --HEAD --use-git-head
brew install emacs-plus --HEAD