I will give you that they're much more maneuverabile and accidents can often be avoided by putting the bike into a space in the road that a car couldn't go into.
I've long wondered about that tradeoff: I've heard some (non-physics-aware) people say that heavier cars/trucks stop faster because they have more traction, but obviously there's a big tradeoff in that equation. As a guess, on a moving wheeled vehicle, 1 kg adds forward energy proportional to velocity, and downward energy constant and independent of velocity? And maximizing that tradeoff would seem to be an engineering goal in order to minimize muscle/gas expenditure. (I'm sure it's well-known but I'm too lazy to look up the details.)
That ignores road/tire and air resistance which are proportional to velocity. And I suppose a key question is the degree to which traction depends on vehicle weight: maybe it depends more on tire and road characteristics, for example. Certainly ice or some kind of low-grip tire would be a big factor.
And that ignores locking up the wheel, as you pointed out.
They really don't. Even if you slam brakes and OTB on a bike you will still fly further ahead than a car doing double your speed will travel after applying brakes normally. This is the insanity of running stop signs on a bike - you can't stop, you cannot swerve nearly as quickly as a car and you will take much more damage when T-boned than a car driver would yet you believe it's safer because:
> take more effort to restart.
Yeah, it's not laziness, it's science and shiet.