The beacon type placement entity is only needed to show the radius visualisation of the unit.
As soon as it is placed down or revived, it will be replaced by the actual maintenance unit, which is a simple chest (type "container"). The radius you see if you hover over this chest is actually completely script rendered.
This chest can like every other chest be connected to a circuit networt to read its contents. Besides the fact that blueprints with maintenance units will not contain the wires connected with this unit, everything else is working fine :)
I hope the devs stand to their promise to include a generic radius visualisation for entities. Then this hack - using a fake beacon unit to show a radius for an item held in cursor - can eventually be removed.