Just out of curiousity I decided to do some testing on the practice dummies in the tutorial. I tested how many hits per minutes I could do hitting air, hitting the dummy from a short distance, hitting the dummy from a long distance, turning with the attack, turnstabbing, random direction of attacks. Every time I got values between 60 and 64 with no clear spread between the different test types. These tests were all done with a staff.
Like Walt said though, there's a difference between attacks per minute and effective attacks. Effective attacks can't really be tested because they depend on so many things (weapon speed, weapon damage, damage type, wpf, ps, enemy armour, your armour, speed bonus, probably some more things).
On a different issues, I found that hitting the dummy from long distance did do more damage than hitting from face hugging range (24 vs 16 on average). More testing would need to be done to confirm this though, since I only tested it with a polearm.