If you've tried hopping in a car from the past few years after driving a much older car you (and you passengers) will have probably noticed this! It's very common in modern cars to have much shorter brake pedal travel, so what would bring you to a gentle stop in an older car will be somewhat more abrupt in a modern car.

This is achieved by having a shorter travel pedal, which is then heavily assisted by the brake servos so it is not horribly heavy to apply. This is nominally for safety's sake, as it reduces the time between seeing a obstacle and the brakes being fully applied. And since all recent cars have anti-lock braking and stability systems it doesn't matter so much if the driver can't control the braking pressure quite as precisely.

> I suppose you could have a more clever system that would move the brake faster until it touches the disc and then behave normally but I suppose that for such a critical system constructors and regulators are very conservative.

Exactly, as I mentioned to the other commenter, it's preferable to have a simple, non powered mechanical system in place to stop the car in the event of bad things happening. Adding extra bits to this system, with the vast R+D cost involved, for marginal increases in fuel economy would be hard to justify for most car manufacturers (especially since the fuel economy saving would benefit the users pockets, not theirs).