You are correct ! ... Heat Pumps don't provide heat like gas, it's a more "Gentler" and gradual style of heat. The major advantage of ductless mini splits is you don't have to service the whole house, only the room your in.
another way of saying blows colder air than gas furnace
I don't recall making a comparison of heat output rates between heat pump and others, but yes they typically put out cooler air and over longer period of time in otherwise equal applications. And there are many possible ways to "zone heat" with gas or other electric sources as well. What is consistent is the heat pump generally will use less input energy to heat a particular space than other more direct heating type sources simply because you are not creating heat with a heat pump but rather just moving heat that is already present wherever you are taking it from. Efficiency does diminish when the point you are taking it from gets colder, and there is a point where it is either no longer more efficient, or it simply can not keep up with heat demand and an alternate backup source might be necessary. This alternate backup not so much required though in places like southern CA where outside temps will seldom if ever drop low enough to have this problem.
In California you have Title 24 which require a heat load engineering study be done to justify the size of the HVAC system. My sample house has theses temperatures preloaded in from "ASHRAE", you just select the list of cities in the software. The completed study will show you the total sensible and latent heat for the structure. Then you refer to the engineering data for that model unit, to select a matching HVAC system.
Understand, but at same time I bet little or none of CA has systems designed based on outdoor ambient of -20F. I believe that is a common low ambient for designing HVAC around here, regardless what type of system it is. It doesn't get that cold very often but you need to be able to keep up to some extent when it does and occasionally it does get even colder.
If you look at my sample house attachment above, you will see that it showed the historical temperature for that area to be -25 degrees.
I would change the focus on that from colder to not as warm or hot.
This is just dancing around the fact that it just doesn't feel as comfortable as forced hot air from a gas-fired furnace.
You are correct ! ... You have to prepare the customer for the difference, or you will have a unsatisfied one. But, all the ones have installed the customers are very satisfied without a gas bill and a much lower electric bill.
Then come the higher efficiencey units with a variable speed blower, they not that new anymore either, mine getting close to 20 years old and I often don't even notice the thing is running unless it gets into a situation where blower is running at higher speeds. It is set to continuously run when not heating/cooling but is at low enough speed you don't notice it unless you put your hand on a register.
