The thing is, wind characters are almost always badly balanced as well. I'm not a scientist, but I can only imagine the weight of the amount of air you're moving to create significant weather effects must be huge, therefore the energy required must be astronomical. Wind characters create great gusts like it's nothing because people forget that air does actually have mass and movement creates friction to be overcome.

Hell, check some of the figures for the kinetic energy of hurricanes out here [url]http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html[/url].

If water elementalists pulled in tsunamis left right and centre people would be pissed, but wind elementalists get away with the exact same thing because people don't get air or physics that well. 

And they really need balancing, because you can't 'dodge' air the same way you can dodge water or rock or fire or something more visible.