I'm pretty sure in the end this will have a similar battery life to the 3DS and PS Vita (3-5 hours). Not great but apparently that didn't stop people from buying those devices. I wouldn't panic because of a report based on a dev kit...
As for the dock: Yeah, I think it's gonna enable active cooling. It looks like the screen is 720p so putting the console into the dock will probably enable higher resolutions (but not much else). That's fine in my opinion.







