Recently, upon making a new world, I went to start up with my traditional setup of computercraft turtles and water mills for power, and noticed an issue, the turtles could not access the inventory of the water mills.
This prompted me to go into a single player world to test if other methods worked, and from different sides. My conclusion was that no item piping system, from buildcraft, to hoppers, to computercraft, could access the inventory of the water mills, so there was no way to create an auto-manned setup.
Is this a bug in the current setup, or an purposeful balance change? Its fine if it is a balance change, I was going to abuse this 'til it was taken out, because I found it to be less laggy than chunkloading the nether, but there is always that fallback. This is with the current dev build of IC2 at the moment by the way (.340 at the time of writing.)