Personally, I'm against any kind of equipment adding a direct bonus to a roll. Equipment could serve as replacing a roll, or as an aspect you can invoke for a boost to a roll, but in and of itself should not provide a direct bonus just for having it.

I am in favor of, however, equipment having weapon or armor ratings or the equivalent (say, boosting the margin of success in the event of a successful roll). For example, a grappling hook shouldn't add a +2 to Athletics for climbing, but should be able to justify using that Athletics roll to scale something otherwise unscaleable and, perhaps, boosting a tied roll (say, someone just barely making it up and struggling to get atop it) to a Fair success (getting to the top quickly and easily). Just like how having a sword doesn't boost your Weapons rolls, but it makes the Weapons rolls that succeed that much more effective.

I was curious where equipment might step over to the bounds of powers, as lots of equipment do things that powers do.

It's appreciated. 

In fairness, I basically knew all of that except for the 'they get a Fate Point' part...so I don't think it'll effect my GMing much. My NPCs rarely do that to PCs, and NPCs getting an additional FP here and there seems unlikely to shake things up too much...

To be fair, sometimes they simply don't want a suboptimal build.

Can you explain what you mean by only for Ritual? As in, Evothaum must be taken again for each aspect of thaumaturgy you wish to be doable as evocation? Once for conjuration, once for warding, etcetera?

My take is as per my writeup of him, and as per Fred's suggestion: Just buy the Powers. I generally stick to this for non-spellcasting powers in spellcasters. It can often be used for really cool additions if done properly.