Regarding the last portion of your comment: the distinction you're making is close to that between a user installing a module, and a developer running tests for his or her own code.

FWIW: for case #1, CPANPLUS doesn't by default emit output to screen when installing a module. It tells you when something went wrong. A test harness could be made to know how many tests it will run, and even conceivably an estimate of how long they are expected to take relative to each other, if this information is stored when the maintainer creates the distribution.

Regarding case #2, the developer, Pugs' Test.pm does in fact produce coordinates for test cases. We use this to cross-link information in the smoke matrices with the actual test code. There's no reason that I know of why this couldn't be ported to the Perl 5 testing frameworks.