But OSU/UW is the opposite. The fact that it's basically unanimous that OSU is #1 and UW is #2 might mean they're only "1 spot apart", or it might mean that there's a 3-spot gap between where OSU is and where UW is.
Your biggest gap is MSU->NU. Given the troubles with Michigan State's offense, I'm not sure that I'd personally rate the gap between the schools to be larger than the gap between OSU and UW.
When we do the tiers in basketball we somewhat account for this, because some years we end up with an "empty" tier showing gaps. Many of the people doing power rankings deliberately insert lines between groups of teams that are their "tiers", where maybe the difference between #5 and #8 is small, but the difference between #8 and #9 is very large.
I do agree with your point that using a collected average helps SOMEWHAT, but I still think it's a bridge too far for this analysis. ESPECIALLY if you're trying to pick and choose east vs west. We may collectively feel that UM and MSU are close, and MN and NU are slightly worse but close to each other, and that will artificially inflate the difference between average between the two groupings. If you're comparing two teams that are next to each other in the rankings it can show where the tier groupings lie, but then when you're arbitrarily looking at one team in the east vs the next available team in the west, you're making logical jumps outside of what this power ranking is supposed to be showing.