People get all wound up in the details. It's still important to note that the two biggest power drains are the LCD and the HD most of the time. Santa rosa will be addressing one of those issues directly, the HD by using flash based cache to prevent spinup. LED LCD will reduce the draw of the second, but we have no idea when they will be ready for inclusion in the Apple laptops.
Personally with the price of flash based drives dropping like a stone, santa rosa may be a stop gap measure as people transition to completely flash based storage on laptops with a huge drop in battery consumption to go with this change.