Also if any Linux laptop can give me 8 plus hours of productive battery life I am also switching. I had problems with an old one where closing laptop lid drained all the battery so I constantly had to worry about the on state of my laptop

It's already here. I got between 13h (normal workload) to 25h (no internet and Emacs only) on the Lenovo x270 with arch and i3wm

Great thanks good to know. Do you have any issues with sleep or closing lid draining battery ?

No issues here. Only issues I got is related to the fingerprint scanner.

Ehh, anecdotal, I know, but a couple of our new MBPs we have bought kernel panic and never wake up from sleep either. I have a Dell XPS 13 and it wakes and sleeps. I recommend cruising the Arch Linux Wiki for your specific laptop you have in mind. It is rare for it to not have some sort of issue you need to iron out around sleep.