Yes but that puts the onus of battery-care on the user of the phone. It's fine for geeks (nb: not a put down, I'm in that category myself) which are going to spend half their time between that and the task killer anyway, but that's not the demographic Apple targets, and that's not the kind of tradeoffs they'd find acceptable. Hence their selection of a different solution, which (they believe) gets you 90% of the way with 10% of the costs.

Not necessarily. It could also be the developer of the application that is taking advantage of the battery monitor functionality to see if their application needs improvement.

I agree that no end user should have to be keeping a watch for applications that use too much battery, but it sure is nice to have that information easily accessible for developers.

It doesn't work very well. There have been occasions where I've accidentally left the PandoraService running on my Droid overnight (not playing music mind you, but that doesn't stop it from sapping battery) and woke up in the morning to find my battery nearly dead and the battery tool claiming that it was "Android System."

Though I suppose it's possible that was a bug in the service management stuff...