You might want to investigate what portion of the great battery life is because it has a honking great battery and what portion is because it's running OS X and has software/hardware written together.
I'd guess you can do better and/or cheaper, but the aesthetics may outweigh any other issues for you.
Good point on the battery life. Reports running Linux I've seen are 2.5 hours (which is really poor), as well as 6-7 hours (possibly due to power consumption tweaks). The aesthetics are nice to have, not the deciding factor.
I'd guess you can do better and/or cheaper, but the aesthetics may outweigh any other issues for you.