Bare in mind that normal desktop distros are also designed to run on laptops and a laptop mode can be enabled to improve power usage (/proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode), but yes, at least in most software, power consumption is an afterthought. The problem with suspend to RAM is that it's not very useful on a phone (i.e. you can't receive calls whilst it's suspended). I'm eager to test Lucid Sleep once it has been mainlined. I think the Neo900 could benefit a lot from something like this.