Okay, let me be a little bit clearer.
What I want to achieve is make the wheel work as follows: Upon a full revolution of the wheel, no matter how fast was it done, I want it to scroll the same amount. As things are now, I am unable to scroll just a little bit (say, to reveal the whole paragraph that spans two additional lines under what's visible on the screen), since a tiny slide of the wheel has to be slow for technical reasons. The system registers this slowness and scrolls the screen only about one or two pixels down. Conversely, when I want to quickly scan through a high web-page, I spin the wheel quickly. And suddenly here I am, instantly at the very bottom.
This occurs system-wide, in Finder, in the browser, and other apps.
The behaviour I'm looking for is default in all Linuxes I've worked with, and also Windows (at least XP).
Those are apparently the only mentions of the problem in the first ten Google results:
[1]
[2](cons 1.)