The way I look at the power thing is that car displacement could be significantly better with more powerful motors without an appreciable risk to other road users (not that I expect anything to be done about it).
When I put the kids on our cargo bike we're getting 250W of power across 200kg of kerb weight, or ~1.25W per kg. When my better half rides just a normal ebike, the all in-weight is say 75kg depending on luggage and suddenly you're up at 4W per kg. We saw up-thread that Chris Hoy enjoyed about 25W per kg with his legs alone.
For most people most of the time, they will get up to the 15mph cut-off pretty quickly and at that point different levels of motor power aren't distinguishable. When we ride down into town, we're often going over 20mph without any assist at all.
The big difference is when you want to carry more weight uphill. I find it really uncomfortable to be doing sub-10mph and in the end it truncated our use of the cargo bike as a car replacement.
It's tempting to see this as a 'thin end of the wedge' argument but I prefer to think of it as the initial arbitrary 250W having been poorly chosen against the kind of jobs that naturally fall into a bike's potential performance envelope (where you could define that as: the kind of load that you can comfortably put on the bike, just not ride it uphill)
The day your kid turns 16 you can pop them on a fully legal 4,000W moped with an absolute basic amount of admin/training and they can enjoy up to 40W/kg. I don't think fears of ebike regulation are necessarily misplaced, but it's quite annoying that a moral panic is limiting light electric transport like it is.
Sometimes it feels like the gatekeeping between bikes and ebikes has moved on from "no true cyclist needs an ebike" to "no true cyclist needs an ebike that does more than 250W". Maybe there's an overton window at play here
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