I don't know how to feel about the battery life. I guess I should have excpected it, but still......

Disappointment is what I'll feel, already bad enough that the NS is huge, but this could really hurt it's portability depending on exactly how long the battery last. Also hope the dock just allows for 1080p and nothing more as I feel there's no use increasing cost and game development for just a bit of extra power that'll probably be irrelevant still.

Not really. It likely will just be a matter of scaling the image quality/frame-rate. With PS4 Pro and XB Scorpio vs. the original versions of these platforms, developers are going to get used to optimizing games for different performance standards. That is going to just be part of the job from here on out. The power differential docked vs. undocked for the Switch likely won't be enough for changes in assets.

I'd suspect they still have a month or so before these things are finalized (price, battery life, etc) and production starts.

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.