Yep, I'm currently sitting here running 10.6.8 battery life tests as we speak. I'm going to make it as comprehensive as I can and run multiple tests on each build of OS X from 10.6.8 to 10.8.2 (prerelease). It will take a while; should be ready by the middle of this coming week.
Though 10.6 did improve overall benchmark performance from 10.5 which was arguably the first regression in OS X, which from its rough inception managed to get better by the point release. It's actually rather alarming that 10.8 is a continuation in decline rather than making up from 10.7's failings.
I switched from using OpenBSD on all my laptops at 10.3 and now I find it very difficult to continue justifying OS X with all of these performance regressions and how increasingly annoying it is to treat the OS as a solid desktop *nix, which is all I ever wanted. As much as I admire DragonflyBSD, I'm likely going to Linux next.
(What I really miss was how snappy and responsive IRIX was...)
The most frustrating thing is that both "the internet" (the blogosphere or whatever you'd call it) and sales numbers are absolutely in favor of Apple's strategy. Sometimes I need to open up the Mac App Store to look at all the grumpy one-star reviews for 10.8, just to know that humanity hasn't completely lost its mind.
Yep, I'm currently sitting here running 10.6.8 battery life tests as we speak. I'm going to make it as comprehensive as I can and run multiple tests on each build of OS X from 10.6.8 to 10.8.2 (prerelease). It will take a while; should be ready by the middle of this coming week.