For those who wonder about the value of points, they represent in a way, pay for the work that you have done to create the pages that make up the backbone of this site. You can spend several hours to create a mountain page and your "reward" is the 4 or 5 points you earn for your effort.
If you have never taken the time to put up a mountain page, then you have no clue as to the work involved. I have some friends who have left summitpost as contributors and switched to making their information available at peakbagger.com as they got tired of the effort involved to put up a decent page. It is easy to scoff at those who have a lot of points and make fun of them but without their effort, there wouldn't be much to see on summitpost.
So, yeah, points do mean something to some of us who put in the time and effort. The problem is in calling them "power" points. The term power is probably the reason why people do end up making fun such as intended by the picture put up by the "Power Lord" here a few days ago. If points were looked at as an indicator of what people have contributed to this site, then maybe we could drop the term "power points" and recognize that summitpost is truly a co-operative effort to share information. Anyway, my 2 cents.