Seriously, this crowd is fairly predictable. THe "Apple does no wrong" goons are and will be out in full force over this. When I started thinking about the battery life I thought, "the blind Steve junkies will simply say to turn off 3G when you don't need it. That makes it all better." The reality is that very few will ever do this. The reality for 99%+ of us upgrading from the old iPhone to the new is that we will have significantly shorter battery life. I share the OPs concern as we just effectively lost close to 40% of our battery life. I'm willing to take that hit because I want the speed, but yikes!
And the reality is that the iPhone's battery life is comparable to other 3G devices. Remember, it's also powering an incredible screen that takes up 90% of the front of the unit.