Given that it's a USB plug powering the device, I doubt it, although maybe the lower power usage by the Pi might provide some extra overhead.

It's nothing to do with the voltage, USB is always 5v. It's about the current these ports can draw, which is 1.2A for the 4 (i.e. 0.3A each if all 4 are under load)

The question IIRC is if the new model will request high amperage from USB ports that can provide it, allowing more peripherals.

Not sure if this is the case since they announced "reduced power consumption" ?

When they say reduced power consumption, they're really talking about overhead. Let's say to supply 5W at 5V, they needed to take in 7W at 120V. This means that voltage step down process results in some power being wasted as heat. By using a switching regulator they waste less power and thus there's less heat output, but the power delivered to the device remains the same. So, in this example, they might only need to take in 6W at 120V to output 5W at 5V. (Note, the numbers are complete BS because I haven't done hardware in a while, but that should give you an idea.)

The numbers are referring to the wrong voltages entirely. It takes in 5V and down-converts that to 3.3V, 2.5V and 1.8V.

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-mode...