EBS (gp2) is flash based, has far better performance than high end magnetic disks, with excellent latency and consistent performance. So, it's more comparable to SSD than anything else.

>Surprisingly not! Testing in ATTO I got read and write speeds that were almost identical, and a peak of 2000 IOps.

Really? Were you looking at 4K write? Typically that would be under 1 MB/s for an SD card.