I also noticed that since I upgraded to iOS 5.1 battery usage on my iPhone 4 has about doubled. So I read all the messages in this thread and tried a few things. "Hard reboot" didn't help, "Reset all settings" and then visiting all my settings again didn't help. Finally did a "Restore" via iTunes, and restored settings and all from an older backup (before iOS 5.1 update), and that was it. Just a trip through settings, and a few updates to do to bring things up to date. My contacts, calendar, notes, reminders, and so on were as they should be. My backup on iCloud was good, too, so if those had been regressed, I could have updated them from iCloud.
I'm not sure why this worked, but I thought that I'd share it. I suspect that it has to do with some stray settings from the "over-the-air" update I did to iOS 5.1. The iTunes Restore took some time since the iOS 5.1 update was downloaded and re-applied, but I have a better feeling that things will be good until the next update *smile*. Then that'll be a new ballgame, we'll see. I may do the next iOS update via iTunes instead of "over-the-air" and see if that has a better result. Or Apple may fix it if this is an "over-the-air" update problem.
I agree that we shouldn't have to worry about this stuff, but spending a little while on it did help restore my peace of mind, and this phone is hard to beat if the battery usage is normal...I was pretty sure that it was a settings thing, since before the 5.1 update everything was fine on my phone.