A heat pump has mechanical things that must cycle, gasses to move, fans to run, and piping through which heat can migrate in/out. Direct resistance heat has no loss to those ancilary systems. The electricity is converted to heat which is directly transferred to the air being conditioned. I just called an HVAC buddy of mine to check. According to him resistance coil heat is as close to 100% efficient as an HVAC system can be.
A heat pump is basically a reversable air conditioner. When working in heating mode, it's pulling in heat from outside to heat the house. Common returns are 3-4 to 1.
1 BTU worth of electricity into a heat pump pulls 2-3 BTUs of heat into the house, plus the BTU of electricity used to operate the systems ends up as 'waste' heat, which is added in, giving you 3-4 units of actual heat.
Thus, heat pump 'efficiency' is actually higher than the 100% effective electric heaters.
As a home owner/renter, all you care about is how much it costs to keep your home's temperature within comfortable levels. Heat pumps slaughter direct electric this way, but cost more. Air exchange units(IE they dump/pull heat from outside air) don't work much below 0 F, so you need a backup. In my area, that's normally propane. NG is normally cheap enough you don't bother with a dual-fuel unit. The occasional home's backup is direct electric, but that's trading installation expense for running expense. In warmer areas where you might use the direct electric are only a few days a year, it's cheaper in the long run because electric resistance heaters are cheap and reliable.
I've always lived in apartments and they've always been electric. Even if your regular heating system is cheaper than electric, you can see that inefficiency becomes much less important in cold climates than in warm ones.
That's the trick: Apartment. By making the heating electric, they can push the bill off on you and the installation is cheap. In my area when I lived in an apartment the heat was provided and they had a big NG furnace to keep the building warm.
As you move south the number of heating days, and the amount of heating needed drops, heat pumps make more sense because you actually want air conditioning, and once air conditioning makes sense for a substantial portion of the year, energy efficient appliances become smart purchases. Me, I buy them because I don't have AC, and I don't want my appliances heating up the house any more than necessary in the summer. That and they save me money all year, if not as much in the winter.
