Unlike other mobile device makers, including Sony and Nintendo, Apple is acutely aware of how important battery life is. The iPad 3 has the same 10 hour battery life as the previous two models.

I'm almost certain you won't get anywhere near ten hours of playing Infinity Blade. Some things take up more power than others - games are near the top of that list.

You probably don't really care, but I was curious, so I did a little test. I played Infinity Blade 2 on my iPad 2 for a little over an hour at medium brightness, medium volume. The battery dropped 12%, which suggests it could keep that up for more than 8 hours on a full charge.

Now keep in mind that my iPad is almost a year old and sees heavy use. My battery has some miles on it. It's quite possible that a fresh iPad battery could maintain that usage for a full 10 hours.

In my experience, the big draw on the battery in these devices is the backlight behind the screen and use of the wireless radios, not the load on the SoC. An iPad doing nothing more than sitting on a home screen will burn through its battery in a little over 7 hours at max brightness. In contrast, an iPad idling  at lowest brightness will last almost 20 hours:

http://www.displaymate.com/IPS_Tablet_ShootOut_1.htm#Backlight_Power

How does that drop in battery life compare to when watching a video for example?

You could be right, I don't own a tablet and was just basing my opinion on my experiences with my laptop's battery life.

As long as it's h264, video has very low impact on power. Unlike most PCs, these devices use special accelerators to decode h264 very efficently rather than burden the general-purpose CPU, so you can expect to see around 10% or so of your battery drain per hour. Add a little if the video is streaming and subtract more if you drop the brightness.

For example, if I watch an hour of Netflix stream before I go to sleep, I lose 8% of my battery because all my lights are off and I drop the backlight right down. I'd guess the same stream at medium brightness would consume about the same juice as Infinity Blade 2. It would save power on the CPU/GPU and spend it on wifi instead.

Here's the thing, the A5 in the iPad 2 is the same CPU as the iPhone 4S, but clocked 25% higher, so it's going to chew through power about 25% faster (probably a little more). But the battery in the iPad 2 is 400% larger than the iPhone 4S. While Infinity Blade might burn down your phone battery in 4 hours, the tablet has way more battery to shoulder that load. The iPad 3 has another 70% more battery to light all those pixels, so presumably it's going to care even less how much load is on the CPU.

bolded is reason the rest doesn't matter :P It's not the same thing as the new ipad is hardly ideal for playing games that require a lot of input from the player.

"only going to look like this and play like this on the new iPad"...

Yea, because that's the only tablet Epic will release this game on from all indications. Also, Android tablets have been releasing with 1GB RAM since the first one (Xoom) came to market - FEBURARY 24th 2011 PEOPLE! This isn't even newsworthy how commonplace it's been. But..the new iPad (3) has 1GB of RAM, and it's a breaking headline. *sigh*

The ignorance of the common consumer is appalling to a tech enthusiast, but that's the market for Apple's Reality Distortion Field. At the end of the day, I can't blame or hate them for it, after all "it's business"...but that doesn't mean I have to like it.