Thermal Expansion Pulverizers and/or Induction Smelters will get you the double ore yields you're used to. The Pulverizer requires smelting the dust afterwards, but most ores give a 5% or 10% chance of an extra bit of dust of another type, such as Iron from Tin, Copper from Gold, or Gold from Copper. The Induction Smelter is faster, especially as it compresses two steps into one, but it requires Sand as a catalyst and it's only extra bonus is Slag which can be smelted into a non-flammable explosion resistant "Rockwool".
The Steam Engine, not the ones with the descriptive names at the front, is a very easy to handle and fairly effective engine to start with, also from Thermal Expansion. It has no risk of exploding. If it overheats from lack of work or water, it will jam up and have to be whacked with the Crescent Hammer to get started again, which actually happens to save you fuel. The Magmatic Engine is another Thermal Expansion engine that functions much the same way but specifically runs on lava, making it the very rough equivalent to a Geothermal Generator. Both of these have a setting for how they interact with Redstone signals, allowing you to set them to be always on even without a lever.
The Aqueous Accumulator generates water that it automatically can pipe elsewhere, useful for everything involving Steam. It gets faster the more water is around it, and I think works similarly to a Water Mill from IC2 in that regard. The Liquid Transposer requires a bit of power in order to "bottle" up whatever liquid you pump into it into Cans or Capsules from Forestry, or Buckets, and can also do the reverse while preserving your Cans and Capsules for reuse.
The Igneous Extruder can be turned into a free Cobblestone Generator, a Smoothstone Generator that mostly costs water, or an Obsidian Generator that costs a bucket of lava and water each. Handy way to obtain an early Enchanting Table. The Magma Crucible takes a lot of power to melt one block into lava which can then be used for a variety of purposes, but it cannot put that lava into a container for you directly. You have to use a Liquid Transposer or do it manually from a Tank for that. Netherrack is converted to lava much more cheaply than other blocks... though you can hook up an Igneous Extruder to a Magma Crucible and power that with four Redstone Engines for occasional automated "free" power as it slowly builds up energy.
And then an extra bonus, the Glacial Precipitator can be powered to freeze water piped into it into Snowballs, Snow Blocks, or Ice, the last one being good for carrying around a stack of source blocks for things such as a mob elevator for a mob trap, or making sure a man-made lake is completely source blocks and thus doesn't have a nasty downward drag.
Since MJ is the only type of power unit for machinery (not including the Infernal Furnace) in the Magic Pack, the Redstone Conduits and Energy Cell greatly enhance your system's energy efficiency and provides a means of storage and throttling to prevent waste. Again, this is a Thermal Expansion feature.
So basically... Thermal Expansion is really useful and will/should definitely be your primary processing and power management source, especially when the Magic Pack is missing its ore processing rivals, IC2 and (strangely) Factorization.
On another note, bees can be daunting to get started in, but they offer a lot of goods when you can really get into them.