After playing with it a bit and almost give up, I discovered the map syntax to (surprisingly) work in HQL. Assuming the class looks like:
class SomeClass {
Map pairKeyProperty
}
You can build queries that look like the following:
select * from SomeClass sc where sc.pairKeyProperty['someKey'] = 'someValue' and sc.pairKeyProperty['someOtherKey'] = 'someOtherValue'
Pretty neat! I still would prefer to use criterias as they are much cleaner to compose, but they seem to not support the same syntax (or I couldn't find it).
I created a sample app in GitHub:
https://github.com/deigote/grails-simple-map-of-string-value-pairs
It can be visisted at:
http://grails-map-of-string-pairs.herokuapp.com/