I remember playing with governor's, disabling hardware, supporting Nvidia Optimus and other stuff in Linux in order to get decent battery life (actually, i got decent out of the box. I wanted good battery life)
This laptop is the first computer I've owned for myself though, and is what let me get into Linux. I tried dual booting for a while, used Windows ~2 times, and never went back.
I can get 8 - 10 hours pretty easily with Linux, and that's using GNOME, so I just haven't worried about it.
I suppose I'll add my n=1 experience that battery life has been pretty good oob.