I love that Google is starting to solve this problem, and from my perspective an extension that is sending and receiving SMS messages should not be requesting the ability to read and change all data on all websites that I access.
They aren't solving the problem. They are making sure only they can get all the user information.
I would rather give all my information to everyone rather than giving all my information to google.
Do You have an android phone? Do You use google for anything? Gmail? Google docs/drive? Youtube? Chrome? ChromeOS? Anything google owns? Then they're selling your data.
Try reading all those fun TOS agreements that come with using any of the aformentioned products, or heck, visiting sites that use google analytics.that won't tell you how much or what data google gets from you, but it'll tell you that you agreed to it.
I think it's important to remember that while PushBullet is known to many of us, is posting on Hacker News, is a valued part of "the community" in some respect, at Google scale this fact is not know. PushBullet is obviously good to _us_, and maybe just needs to tweak permissions a little, but to a reviewer at Google it probably looks very similar to the hundreds of extensions they may review a day, many of which may contain malware.
They have to use certain metrics to sort the good from the bad, and abuse of the permission system – intentional or not – is a pretty good one when you care about the end user.