Although I am warming to
Mutants & Masterminds, I have to laugh at their advertised claims that the system does away with the tedium of tracking hit points. It does -- but replaces it with the tedium of tracking
bruises. Every time I have to write down my bruises, I can't help but think, "this could just as well be hit points, couldn't it?" Furthermore, M&M introduces
more "conditions" (i.e., "held," "dazed," "debilitated," etc.) than COH's status effects plus Hero System plus Savage Worlds
combined. Heh. We've been playing a few months now, and still scramble to figure out what it means when someone is "staggered" or "restrained."
As far as point values go, while you can use any level, M&M (3rd Edition currently) seems to peg PL 10 as the "novice superheroes starting out" level. Champions/Hero System used to use 250 for that, but their current 6th Edition has upped that to 400 (I think the removal of "figured characteristics" raised the baseline costs). In Champions,
The_Laughing_Man's numbers are a decent guide, although I personally would prefer to peg the median speed lower, so that speed-themed characters are more differentiated from the pack. (I traditionally like to see about half the players at 4 and the other half at 5, except for deliberate outliers).
The important thing about setting power levels is to make sure everyone is on the same page. I was once in a Champions campaign that was intended to be "street level," meaning both "dirty and violent" and also "lower-powered." My character concept was a super marksman (Bullseye-type); another player had a master of kung fu whose mutant power destroyed gunpowder/explosives, and we had a catboy. After dealing with a few bank robbers and terrorists, we were joined by a new player whose character, for reasons never fully explained, had enough telekinesis strength to rip the torch off the Statue of Liberty -- and wield it. In the inevitable "we wind up mistakenly fighting the new player before she joins the team" scenario, I was trying to do things like momentarily blind her with a thrown paperclip...and she picked me up and threw me a few hundred feet, instantly ending the fight and hospitalizing me (I would have bled to death without GM intervention).
For decades afterwards, that mismatch in powerlevel has been the go-to example of what to guard against during character design. "Street-level" should not mean "able to level the entire street."