"Heavy Use" on an iBook (or even a MacBook Pro from, say, 2009) is literally nothing to a current low end MacBook Air, and the 17h estimations are with Pages and Safari open. If you restrict yourself to Apple's applications (or other heavily Mac-friendly apps), you'll get really good battery life on it because OS X is just really great at managing energy.
Plus, if you drive the MacBook Air really hard, you should still get over five hours out of it. Like, completely full load on the GPU and CPU and full brightness for five hours is still impressive. It's not "the advertised" but also, if you're driving a computer at full-bore all the time, the MacBook Air was the wrong computer to get from the start, and unfortunately, running it off of its own internal battery for very long was never going to happen.
Fortunately for those of us more or less within the band of MacBook Air users, in the course of fifteen years since the original iBook came out in 1999, battery technology has changed a lot and charging batteries "correctly" on Macs, iPads, most tablets, and some premium Windows devices (Microsoft's in particular) matters a lot less than it did previously.
Also, (again, what TheWhiteFalcon said) solid state media, better screen technology, better wireless technology, and a whole list of things mean that today's mobile computers are just more power efficient to begin with.
AnandTech's MacBook Air battery testing: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7180/apple-macbook-air-11-2013-review/2
I haven't found a formalized review of the two cheapest long-battery Windows computers you can buy today, the aforementioned HP Stream 11 and Asus X205, but they're so inexpensive I am close to just buying one myself to see what they're like. The dual- and quad-core Intel Atom chips used in these machines are extremely impressive compared to the netbooks of yore, and we're so very close to the point where $200 machines have the same specs and are as fast as my $3000-or-so notebook from 2009.
Battery life is one of those interesting things where there's different strategies to it. Apple's has (for a few years, at leat) been based around efficiency, and if you showed the me of 1999 an 11- or 13-inch MacBook Air and told me about it, I would almost certainly not have believed it. (Though, maybe somebody who was slightly older than I was in 1999 would have been able to extrapolate that as a possibility. The original iBook completely blew my mind because up to that point, laptops weren't something that often got talked about for their really impressive battery life.)
For a while, I was using an IBM WorkPad Z50 as my main note-taking and writing computer, after my main ThinkPad's battery had totally kicked it, just after I got the iPad but became unimpressed with it for just a few reasons, but before I dove all the way back in with OneNote on my ThinkPad when I got it a new battery.
My favorite part was probably saving formatted RTF files onto CF cards and plugging them into my modern ThinkPad, opening them in Word or WordPad, and then still being able to bring them back to the Z50 if need be.
Now and again I consider dragging it out once more.
That makes literally no sense. I could write German or Italian on my WorkPad (or on an Apple II) and it would do so as well as when it was new. Until we switch to different characters, or the differences in language and other things that do exist (like, new currency symbols in some localities) become a big problem, text processing will always be one of those things that "works the way it did when it was new." -- This isn't really what this thread is about, but for the oldest of computer systems that's both a blessing and a curse.
The issue isn't ever that "oh noes, English is different!" The issue is almost always that file formats are different or a networked operating system is woefully insecure or that (in the case of OpenSTEP) even with networking there's almost nothing on the system that'll produce files compatible with anything else.
To continue my thought from my quote of beachycove's text -- while a newton or workpad is perfectly capable of accepting English text as input (presuming you're okay adding to their spell-checker dictionaries,simply turning off editing tools, or using a plain text editor) I personally question whether or not it's still the best tool for the job, or maybe more importantly, whether or not it should be used for those tasks, just because it can.
For me personally: The main reason I don't drag out my Z50 is because why should I bother with RTF files on a CF card when I can just use my Surface RT, and save DOCX files directly to my local SharePoint server, sync up my OneNote notebook, and if need be, check my e-mail on it. It lasts around 8-10 hours on an average day and for what a Surface RT is even capable of (Office, Internet Explorer, and tablet apps) that's all the more time I need. The battery cover for the Surface 2 approximately doubles that life, in case I was in super adventure mode, but I'm not often.
So, I guess it depends on if you're lookign for the experience of employing a certain technology, regardless of what affects that has on your productivity or workflow, or just getting stuff done in the coffee shop.
That said, I think a lot of people think that these concepts are worth looking at combining, and so the Hemingwrite exists: http://hemingwrite.com/ -- if you're just writing, it gets a few weeks of battery life, has an outdoor-usable screen, and synchronizes with dropbox, evernote, google drive, or whatever.
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