I'm surprised that cooling takes less energy than heating. I imagine that depends a lot on the temperature range; they only need so much to cool a room even on a "hot" day in the UK.

Still... AC still feels like magic. I know how it works and understand the over-unity factor. But it feels like it ought to take enormous energy for it to work at all.

I think specifically it's comparing gas heating vs AC. Heat pump heating would probably do better. In other words, it takes less energy to move heat inside/outside than to "create" it

(With caveats like heat pumps are much less effective in extreme cold)

Yeah without knowing the climate, temperature delta and insulation these values don't really mean much.