Ended up going with Hawk HPS, which for the two days I've used them so far, have been excellent. I couldn't seem to adjust to the soft bite on the OEMs.
I haven't had as much time with them as I'd like (now 3 days), but so far, for my purposes, yes. The initial bite and stopping power seem more like my prior cars ('06 330i and and '03 330ci). They also seem to hold the bite after some harder street driving. I wouldn't say the OEMs are bad, but they could definitely be improved... esp since most are running at least stage 1. BTW, they haven't been noisy so far either.
If they're still available I may be may be interested. If you give me the size of the box and approx. weight I can figure out shipping costs, to see if it's worth it to ship them to me.