Pulse is generally not recommended for use with can motors. The sealed can tends to hold heat in so they will burn out more easily than open frame motors. If you have Athearn blue box locomotives that have been converted to can motors, or Atlas, Kato, P2k, Athearn Genesis or r-t-r, or other of the newer locomotives, they will have can motors installed and pulse is not needed. The main thing the pulses do is kind of give the armature a series of "kicks" to get the motor turning at very low speeds. That way your locomotive starts smoothly at low throttle settings when switching. If you have a stock train set engine from an old dept store train, you may have noticed that you need a lot of throttle to get it moving and then it seems to jump from a stop to high speed immediately. That is the sort of thing that pulse was designed to eliminate. Can motors start turning as soon as power is applied.
Not so sure I agree 100% with you, Russ. Pulse power does create some extra heat, but certainly no more than operating a motor at lower speeds using the pulse width modulation which is standard with DCC, and probably quite a bit less.
Can motors do have less cogging than a conventional open frame motor because the magnets are curved in a cylinder around the armature. (As a side note, can motors with flat sides give back some of that even magnetic field to install in tighter spaces. Skew wound armatures, regardless of open frame or can, do a lot to reduce cogging, too.) And can motors do have less ability to dissipate heat. But can motors have higher resistance windings, and operate on lower current, so they produce less heat, too.
Coreless motors are the problem area with both pulse power and DCC. Because they do not have iron mass in their armatures, they do overheat very easily when operated with pulses and/or loads.
Both present-day can and open frame motors do not have overheating problems on the various types of pulse power, provided a reasonably free running mechanism. Some older, less efficient can motors with poorer magnets might get hot with pulses, but so do open frame motors where the magnets no longer have their intended strength.
Conventional pulse power will not produce the same top speed as full wave DC because the average voltage is less with every other pulse removed.
hope this helps