What is Steampunk For?

I was browsing through other blogs today and came upon M Harold Page, who is a writer of fantasy and SF, and he was musing about Steampunk as a literary genre on February 12th.
He compares it to SF and Fantasy, and concludes that Steampunk allows a writer to write about things that are difficult to do in either SF or Fantasy - a world of corporations and industrial development, but without the health and safety rules of the modern world (which would only become more restrictive in an imagined future), and where a writer can pick and mix Victorian elements with feminism, sky pirates and (obviously) dirigibles.

I can sympathise with this view (and it's a very enjoyable blog). I have an idea for a Steampunk story based on something I saw in another blog - Beyond Victoriana: a Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk. Ayleen the Peacemaker told the true story of Mongolian book-selling bandits that made me long to include them in a story. Apparently, in the 19th century, Chinese novels translated into Mongolian were wildly popular in Mongolia. Book sellers would take trains of pack horses through wild country to get the novels to their audience, and sometimes they were attacked by bandits, who would then sell the books themselves!
I am working on my own Steampunk persona, Miss Amelia Harper (named after my real great grandmother - though this Amelia is far more glamorous!) So I thought I'd send her to Mongolia, working undercover for a Victorian Torchwood type institute, with her Chinese friend Li Bic (based on the daughter of our local Chinese takeaway, who used to take my dog for walks), and get her mixed up with the Mongolian book bandits, an inter continental railway line, and mining engineers. In the modern world, and in a future world, my heroines would have to deal with annoying things like passport controls - and my science is definitely of the mad scientist/giant ray gun variety. Place the story in a pseudo-Victorian past, though, and a lady of the British Empire can get away with an awful lot when faced with foreign officialdom!

It's going to be a while before any of this is knocked into shape as a story - I'm stuck in the middle of Ytir for the foreseeable future. One of my characters has cursed the wrong person by mistake, and they're all at the "OMG what do we do now?" stage of dealing with it.