It can be. The OMAP3 goes into an extremely low power mode when it can, where it basically consumes no power. This is why optimization and testing is important--a phone spending most of its time doing nothing, and a few seconds crunching everything it needs to, is a phone with a long battery life.

Most people aren't really familiar with this kind of behaviour in a mobile device (at least not to this degree), so i see over and over here that something that wakes the phone a lot causes much shorter battery life. It's not really a surprise, but until people get used to the idea, they're going to be surprised by it.