While I respect what you feel your needs are, these types of ultimatums are unproductive. I would sacrifice both price and battery life for something that blew me away in other respects. The type of thinking that limits possibility is very much the opposite of Apple: "I won't buy it if it doesn't have a floppy drive", "I won't buy it if it doesn't have optical media", "I won't buy it if it is not a new design".
In the end, I think Apple does a good job of helping us not stay mired in our old thinking of what we want or need, but giving us what truly changes the way we live and work.
I have mixed feelings about your position. It doesn't matter how great a device is if you can't use it and you can't use a device that runs out of power. And you can't make the claim that moving from three days of standby time on a device to one day (or less) of standby time positively changes the way we live and work. I'd like to replace my iPhone 3G. But I'm not buying the 4s until they completely fix the battery drain issue.
IMO, Apple has a mixed record of pushing us forward. Jobs' insistence on a one-button mouse was counter-productive, IMO, a true case of form over function. But I don't judge Apple too harshly on that issue because they always provided the option of using a third party device. Did Apple push us forward when they released the hockey-puck mouse? That was a disaster and made Apple look silly.
Getting rid of old legacy connections like the old parallel and serial ports was generally positive, except in the cases where you had invested in a whole bunch of peripherals that no longer worked. But Apple's more recent move from the mini-display port to Thunderbolt with no backwards compatibility was a bad move as was their dropping of FireWire on some models. It's moves like this that hurt Apple in the development and the corporate community because you can't trust Apple to not drop something at a moment's notice that you've made an investment in.
Apple's move from ZIP drives to CD-R was a good move, since those old ZIP drives were notoriously unreliable. But Apple's reluctance to support Blu-ray and their supposed elimination of optical drives in all future models is a bad move, IMO. I realize that not everyone has a use for an optical drive, but I still need my optical drive and I really don't want it to be an external device. If the purpose is to have a thinner MacBook Pro, then I simply don't see the difference between the Pro line and the Air line. I don't see why Apple can't give us a choice. (And in this case, I can't help but feeling that this isn't so much a case of pushing us forward or even forcing us to a certain vision of the future, but instead a position to force us to purchase all apps and entertainment directly from Apple, which is an extremely cynical approach.)
I do agree with you that people who say, "I won't buy it unless it's a new design" are a bit silly. While a new great design is certainly fun, it's nothing more than fashion.
