Seriously, I get wanting consistency, but your initial changes to them, however accidental, made them just straight up better. I'm not even a redstoner and I was getting so excited to use them once I updated, and now they're supremely underwhelming. They are better for the game that way, and they should act like that on all platforms.

Not every single thing changed needs to be reverted, but I'd recommend the following:

1. Make them only power dust by 1 again. This allowed us to do tiled designs, e.g. for pumpkin/melon farms. They were SO good there (and not overpowered – using an update detector to detect crops makes sense), and now they're far less usable.
2. Make them strong power blocks they point into. They point directly into a block and power it — everything else that does this gives that block strong power (e.g. repeaters, dust running into a block). It was more useful AND it's more consistent.
3. Make them only power for 1 redstone tick (currently they seem to do even more than that for some reason, I presume this is a bug). The 1 game tick power was actually pretty cool, but not consistent, so I understand leaving it at 1 redstone tick once that's fixed.

I get the change to placement (doesn't really matter all that much, though I liked the other way better) and of course making them not power air makes much more sense despite it being funny. But those other 3 changes are what made the community so excited for them. You should port those changes to PE instead of making PC observers act like the PE ones.