Diablo – Fire Walkers critical hit

According to Bashiok:

...faster speed weapons consume more resource but may do more damage. Channeled skills might still be better with slower weapons though because on a channeled skill, you have as much mobility as you want, so the "mobility" and "overkill" advantages of faster weapons are eroded with channeled abilities, so all you’re left with is increased mana cost for increased damage.

So yes, a faster weapon will cause more skills to tick faster, resulting in you dealing more damage over time, but will result in you using up more resources as you are channeling faster.

Channeling mechanics

Let's use Ray of Frost as an example,

Cost: 20 Arcane Power

Effect: Channel a beam of frost that deals 215% weapon damage as Cold.

Since this is a channeled skill. The resource cost ticks by 10 and drains that much Arcane Power at twice the speed of your weapon. If your attack speed is 1 attack per second, instead of draining 20 Arcane Power once per second, it will drain 10 Arcane Power every half seconds.

Additionally, Since Ray of Frost is a channeled spell. It is broken down into many small attacks that deal a total of 215% weapon damage based on your attack speed. If your attack speed is 1 attack per second, it will deal a total of 215% weapon damage per second.

tl;dr: The faster the weapon attack speed, the faster the drain; slower the weapon attack speed, slower the drain.

Damage-dealing

Assuming two weapons have the same damage, the faster weapon will use up resources faster than the slower one when channeling, but the faster weapon will take less time to do full damage than the slower one.

• An axe at 15 damage and 1.0 attack speed will drain slower. (15 DPS)

• A wand at 15 damage and 1.5 attack speed will drain faster, but will do
  the same damage faster. (22.5 DPS)

For the Critical Mass passive, what is meant by the "chance" is that it is determined by the proc coefficient of the spell you cast. Single target spells have 100% "chance" to reduce the cooldown by 1 second while AOE spells have differing sets of proc coefficents by spell AND rune. There's a few sites that break down proc coefficents of various spells which applies to crit chance as well as return on LOH. Here, and here. Luckily people with more patience than me seem to have most spells crit proc chance figured out.

Some useful proc chances for popular wizard spells:

Hydra: 0%, Hydras never proc
Magic Missile / Seeker: 100%
Shock Pulse / Piercing Orb: 25% per target hit
Blizzard / Snowbound: 2% per tick per target hit
Energy Twister / Wicked Wind: 10% per tick per target 
Explosive Blast / Chain Reaction: 11% per target hit per explosive (of 3)

I've recently been trying the Windup Wizard/CM build which still seems pretty effective, and a bit silly (in fact it was the easiest way for me to beat inferno Ghom). From personal experience I've found that on my wizard, when I run over 40% crit chance while using a build like windup wizard, everything is off cooldown pretty much all the time.