Given that recent Apple laptops already have solid all-day battery life, with such a big performance per watt improvement, I wonder if they'll end up reducing how much battery any laptops ship with to make them lighter.
No, because battery life isn't just about the CPU. The CPU sits idle most of the time and when it's not idle, it's at workloads like 20% or whatever. It's the screens that eat batteries because they're on most or all of the time and sucking juice. Look at Apple's docs and you'll see the battery life is the exact same as the previous model. They have a battery budget and if they save 10% on CPU, they give that 10% to a better screen or something. They can't shrink the battery by half until they make screens twice as efficient, not CPUs which account for only a small fraction of power draw.