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This also gives the time of the entire pipeline (since the commands all begin together and only finish when the last command has completed):

echo | /usr/bin/time sleep 1

I'm pretty sure this is wrong.

As an example :

sleep 2 | /usr/bin/time sleep 1

This gives an output of "1 second" even though the entire pipeline took 2 seconds.

Ok you can wangle your way out of it. But if you're doing something like `grep "$something" | /usr/bin/time some_job` then generally you're fine.

Wouldn't the system/user time be wrong though?

The sleep sub-process of time is not part of the pipeline, however. It will exit after the requested time has passed.