Ephemeral is definitely not EBS, as its I/O does not contribute to saturating an instance's network connection (I've tested that). EBS has a ceiling for throughput (the instance's network throughput) and competes with your other network traffic, which is interesting for database workloads for obvious reasons. In addition, every single benchmark I've seen run reports ephemeral behaving very differently from EBS.

As ephemeral disappears when you stop an instance (presumably, when the system is given the opportunity to relocate your instance to another machine), I've always suspected that ephemeral storage was part of local disks on the virtual host's chassis -- as opposed to a SAN or other kind of network-attached storage. As such, you probably end up with the same unpredictable performance you find in all virtualized resources, since it is very unlikely that Amazon is giving you your own storage.

Before benchmarking ephemeral storage you have to pre-warm it, which might have contributed to your findings. Ephemeral is worlds better than EBS, particularly in outage scenarios; if I could convince everybody on planet Earth to stop using EBS, it would be a noble cause.