Electrons move a lot faster than molecules, you could invent X in the United States and a person in China could be using it tomorrow without any cumbersome shipping or cultural barriers to adaptation.

The hammer, fertilizer and the metal press are all part of our tool-making culture, ways to adopt nature to do our bidding and in the case of the hammer and the metal press to shape it by brute force. In contrast, something like TensorFlow is a tool of the mind which means you can encode it as bits and those will travel the world a lot faster than your average bulk goods or container ship every will.

So they are comparable at some level and totally incomparable at others.

Even if software didn't have tremendously higher cultural barriers for usage than manual equipment, the rapidity of exchange is a very small component of the exchange value for the means of software production (which is primarily hardware anyway). The value of both hardware and software is measurable by the amount of labor needed to produce them, so it's not even comparable--it's identical.