Short version - I would think that violates the TOS.

From a philosophical point of view:
"an explicit timed delay being used to provide conditional logic". - as soon as you are supplying logic to the game using a 3rd party application, you have violated the TOS.

"The only difference is that the "clock tick" is provided by the user rather than the system. I personally feel both are automation but if other people feel differently then surely our proposal would be ok as well. " - The big difference is that the timing is provided by the user - not the system. Sure it's a fine line, and blizzard may well decide that the current /click spam isn't correct either. But as soon as you supply that timing outside the game, then I think you are in violation. I can appreciate your argument that all you are trying to do is the same thing that /click does, but you are specifially building in a pre-set timer.

From a CYA point of view:
Blizzard can (and does) occasionally ban people from using an "in-game" exploit. I'm sure you can find a few examples on the forums from people that felt that were only doing things Blizzard had already built into the game. But those cases are pretty rare. I'd guess 99.999% of the time Blizzard just fixes the "exploit" if they were the ones that caused it in the first place. Overall if you look at all the bannings that Blizzard has done since the game came out. I would guess 99.999% of them were from someone using a 3rd party application. I think if you built this logic into your product you would be subjecting your users to possible banning.