I’m not sure that “machine” is even a technical term in science. It’s more of a casual term. Scientific explanations are often oversimplifications, but an oversimplification is often more useful than a fully detailed account.
Anyway, for perspective, I’ll stick my neck out and say that an automobile is not a machine. It is mainly a machine, but not completely a machine. It’s operation depends on a combustion process, and that combustion process is not something that I would consider a machine.
If we compare to a living organism, then there are mechanical systems throughout, but there is also a distributed system of thermodynamic processes (roughly analogous to the combustion process of the automobile).
As for what we can say about life – I’m not sure we will ever have a complete answer to that. Finding life elsewhere in the cosmos would help. Yes, biochemistry tells us a lot about living systems. But we don’t know enough that we could design a wholly original living system.
I should note that I’m a mathematician, not a biologist.