Re battery life, I will anecdotally share that I frequently do video chatting with a friend in the UK, and on more than one occasion have done this on battery power. Last time, after literally two hours of running video chat, the MBP still had 35% battery left. My PC couldn’t even run Word for that long on battery. 
My wife has a Toshiba netbook and the battery on that thing is a beast. She regularly gets 8+ hours out of it while doing routine tasks (web browsing, watching some videos, word processing). When I bought it, I noticed that most of the netbooks in our price range were nearly identical in specs anyway but a few reviews mentioned the battery on the Toshiba so I went in that direction. Good call.
I only bring it up because positive computer battery stories are so rare. We were really surprised.
I have a newish Toshiba that gets about an hour of continuous screen-on use. Laptop batteries just aren’t very good.