Those laws would be a great example of legislators being technologically ignorant. Optimizing for bursty behavior is not only acceptable, but is what you typically want. Even if you're a developer, your compile-edit cycle typically will be on the order of a couple of minutes of load, or less. Being able to ramp up to 4 GHz during that time and then rushing to idle is what maximizes performance within a given thermal constraint.

As to advertising, advertising the burst speed, with the appropriate caveat, is usually the correct decision too. Under full load, almost any modern laptop will get under 2 hours of battery life. Should they be advertised as such? No, that's a completely un-helpful metric. Under typical use, where the machine is idle most of the time, you will in fact get 8 hours or whatever of use.

Apple actually advertises these machines as 2.2 or 2.6 GHz machines, with "up to 4.3 GHz Turbo Boost" in smaller font below. This is actually probably deceptive (though in a way that is not favorable to Apple). In typical use, the machine will feel more like a 4.3 GHz machine than a 2.6 GHz one. (E.g. comparing it to your 2.6 GHz Haswell-era Mac.)