The positive impressions that I have was the move back to scissor switches, revamp of the keyboard for an ESC key, and change in airflow for cooling. I am impressed that the price stayed the same or cheaper, but that's only because the pricing for components have significantly dropped, as an example flash chips for the SSD storage. I appreciate the bump in the GPU and upgrade to 8GB GDDR6.
However, one of the points OP made about the brightness is reason to be unimpressed. HP released the Elite Dragonfly which has 1000 nits and higher resolution display. Dell XPS have them, as well. But, 500 nits isn't terrible and is above average.
The DCI-P3 color gamut is Apple's implementation of color profiling for displays and is standard in their MBP line for some time. I believe it falls within the sRGB and Adobe RGB color accuracy range. It's only about 25-50% wider than sRGB. There are many displays on notebooks now from Alienware, Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, etc. whereby their displays are anywhere from 100-250% wider than sRGB. So, yeah, that's something to consider.
The refresh rates have a range of about 40-60 Hz. There are many other higher-end displays which satisfy the color range, brightness, and resolution at 120 Hz refresh. Another valid point.
The resolution is a nice increase which, I believe most won't notice except in specific applications when zooming in/out. However, I get that it's still not industry leading at 4K+. The difference is noticeable but not something that I put a great deal of weight on between the difference of 3072x1920 vs 3840x2160 on a 15-16" display. You can see the difference, though. So, I see their reason for making this an argument.
Overall, I believe the idea is that even with the price being the same as the previous 15.4" '16-'19 product line, there hasn't been a real bump in any display technology or features which would satisfy someone going to the new 16" in terms of display improvements. It's essentially the same display as the other Retina for UI experience.