way faster than Minecraft though! it can take a minute per instruction in the redstone videos I've seen. probably because Minecraft works on ticks affecting adjacent voxels and Factorio is more like labview (not to mention its seemingly excellent engine perf.)

It's probably more related to the fact that the basic building blocks in Factorio are much higher level than in Minecraft. You create these out of wires (adders), arithmetic combinators (any other arithmetic operator), and decider combinators (comparisons). Additionally, you have 2 "channels" for data (red and green wires), and "data" is actually a vector of numbers (since each wire carries a "count" for each "item type").