Basically as photomankc said, speed is money. Sure it's not as important for a guy just as a hobby.
Newbies should go slow anyway. You need to worry more about getting a good part
than getting one fast. When I put someone new on a job in the production machine shop I was foreman,
I told them to take their time, speed will come with practice.
Same goes for CNC, you don't run your first part with the machine maxed out,
unless you're fond of crashes.
If it's a production run, you increase speed a bit after each good part.
A rotary table is a good tool to have around, lots of uses for it manually
and then could be converted to a 4th axis for CNC.
Have a bunch of links here for some educational materials.
http://www.hossmachine.info/forum/ya...n-Newbies.aspx
Hoss