They do it (basically) by predicting whether your hand will touch the blade, rather than waiting until it does touch the blade.
If you wait until someone actually touches the blade, then yes, you have to operate very very fast. That is unavoidable due to physics, as you say.
But if you can gain 100ms or 250ms by proving a 100% probability that the hand will touch the blade before the person can stop it, you now have a lot more time to stop the blade.
I can't think of anything, short of dropping a person on the saw.