You may be right, I have no way to test though since my battery is behaving fine at this time. My last iPhone was fine though until I installed 5.0.1 with iTunes and after than chaos. That iPhone started turning itself on and off and having panic.plist in the log, so was replaced.
My new iPhone is 6 weeks newer than the the first, which was a week 40 64GB sim free 4S (UK) and after three charges with minimal usage, facebook, a few times a day, a few quick calls, and some light texting it lasted 3 Days with 6hours of useage. This was with wifi on and cellular data, but send diagnostics off raise to speak with Siri off and diagnostic location data and iAds off and push email off as well as local weather off since I use an app for that. I left it to see how it would behave and so far so good. I have no 3G in my area though. The phone was from a different factory, it did not have the sim bug my old one had where it would lose network with sim pin on or just loose the network even with the later 5.0.1 version.
On my new handset I updated to 5.0.1 (not the latest version) via wifi on the new handset it pulled the older version down for some reason. I do have a slightly loose home button, a tiny amount of movement but tbh since right now its working I can live with that. After charging if I leave it and don't use it for an hour (no sms received or calls of course) it shows 0 minutes usage unlike my old one that had a runaway process. I have no idea what changed from my last phone to this phone, so maybe it is the phones ability to talk to iTunes as my old one was updated on my iMac with an older version of iTunes, and so this phone has only ever connected with the latest version.