Well, I run a pretty no frills Windows 7 installation (no animations, black background, use Black Viper's website to make sure I'm running the bare minimum services and processes). No idea if that even does anything, not a hacker here. But if I'm stingy with the backlighting I'll get between 5 and 5.5 hours of "normal" internet usage.
So it's not as good as advertised, and doesn't seem as good as when OSX is running. That said, it's still relatively great hardware; there are quite a few Windows 7 laptops around my office, and nobody is bragging about how great their battery life is.