That's the one point where the "de facto standard" status of setuptools is relevant to the question of whether the entry_points.txt format is a PyPA interoperability standard: it is, because providing a functionally equivalent capability is required for publishers to be able to transparently switch from setuptools to something else without their end users noticing the difference.
Nope. Because this isn’t a packaging feature. It’s a runtime feature of setuptools, and we do everyone a disservice by trying to move this into the purview of distutils-sig just because setuptools included a feature once. Just because setuptools included a feature does *NOT* make it a packaging related feature.
Tell you what, I’ll drop everything today and write up a PEP that adds metadata for console scripts to the packaging metadata where it belongs, so we can move console_scripts entry point to a legacy footnote as far as packaging systems go. Then we can discuss whether an arbitrary plugin system is actually a packaging related spec (it’s not) on it’s own merits.