It seems that a battery life issue with the Duo CPU has been found to lie soley within software, and is not the fault of the CPU itself. A bug in a driver for Windows caused the system to consume more power than normal when plugging in a USB 2.0 device, resulting in up to an hour in lost time.
"Microsoft acknowledged to TG Daily - via the hands of Intel - that they believe the problem our engineers observed to have been caused by a misbehaving driver included in Windows XP SP2 - specifically, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) driver, which is part of the operating system's power management scheme for USB 2.0."
Microsoft is remaining tight-lipped about the particulars of the issue, and after a patch is applied, an example system was tested and found to have over 4 hours of battery life. For a performance-oriented laptop, that is outstanding, and really does show good things for the mobile community. The last IDF brought hopes of laptops lasting an entire workday on a single charge, and there seems to be more truth in that some had thought.