My battery life seems to be doing better. During the flight yesterday (PHX - BWI), I was using iBooks the entire time except for when I watched two TV episodes (like 1.5 hours of video). When I got to the hotel, I noticed the iPad still had 73% battery life left. I can deal with that.
I hate how they changed the rotation switch to a mute button though. To me, it makes no sense. Now the only way to get to the rotation lock is to go to the multitask toolbar, scroll over and hit it. I never use mute on the thing, but rotation lock was used all the time. Now there are two ways to mute the iPad literally right next to each other, but only one ridiculously unintuitive way to lock the screen rotation.