I do not know if those figures actually represent some sort of "commercial handgun standard" - I don't recall ever seeing it published - but that is exactly what my hobbyist friends and I have used as a gage since the beginning of recorded time, in terms of a service pistol. For a target pistol, we expected 3-inches at 50-yards. Realistically speaking, we found very few autoloaders that met our expectations while high-quality revolvers were able to do so routinely. For the most part, autoloaders these days do seem to be better than they were.