In fairness to the new bulb design, it probably does legitimately give a brighter intensity of light almost everywhere in the beam. There's not much off-axis light that gets emitted from the lamp housing anyway. Bands of tint at the fore and leading edge of the glass envelope are often used to keep a bulb with its legal limitations. How?
A bulb's light output is measured in an integrating sphere, which measures light all around the bulb. Because off-axis light doesn't contribute in a significant way to performance in the lamp housing, a bulb without the tinted bands is "handicapped" in the sense that all that extra light still counts "against" it in terms of maintaining bulb compliance. Using tinted bands as the new SS Ultra apparently does, it can maintain that bright over-driven core of light without being penalized by too much off-axis light. In other words, bands like what are on the SS Ultra and others permit this bulb to have a brighter core and still be within compliance.
I would consider this a legitimate design improvement over the previous bulb, which had a lighter tinting across the whole envelope. The filament live likely is still rather short...but I'd guess that there's a true performance gain with this new design compared with previous.