Some machines, like harvesters, have a pretty decent speed of working. Some other machines, like auto-enchanters that do 30 levels of echanting, are rather slow.
How about speed upgrades? With speed upgrades, you can:

1. Make machines scale from early game to endgame.
2. Balance machines in TE manner. Planter + harvester + fertilizer combo is very powerful because harvester works very fast and you can fill two 64-stacks JABBA barrels with logs and charcoal in 2 to 3 hours. However, if you implement speed upgrades, you can limit the player in the early game and give more possibilites to players in the endgame, like make a fully-upgraded harvester chop off an entire tree treecapitator-style or just harvest 3x3x3 chunks of wood at a time.
3. Suffice players' thirst for powercreep. We can build big reactors that pump out thousands of RF per tick, we can build a frame-quarry that can mine out an entire chunk in a minute, but we also have an auto-enchanter that needs more than a minute to enchant an item and an auto-spawner that is not comparable to EnderIO's auto-spawner because of how slow it is.
   How awesome would be to use a x64 overclocked mining laser instead of a frame-quarry, or to build a mob-grinding facility that can generate a diamond chest of loot in ten minutes?

Well, actually, all 3 of my points are about balancing the machines, but whatever.

Implemented by 3ae0dda (though the items are only provided by TE/other mods at present)

agreed