Hopefully, in conjunction with this change, we'll get a more cohesive tech path for horse units. If the tech path now goes horse->knight->lance-> calvary, and get's to the lancers without having to research gunpowder (why that makes any sense, I'll never understand, since they are decidedly not a gunpowder unit), I'll be happy, even with a slight nerf to unit strength.
As it is, you get pretty badly stalled at knights and need to jump over to riflemen at that point. It would be nice to be able to make the change to lance before that is ready.
Unfortunately the tech tree as it's currently structured isn't very conducive to this. We'll see if they managed to rework this as part of their upgrade path fixes.