I would go less than a day with a virgin Nexus S, just by playing an hour or three of music.
Some phones handle much better in the face of low signal, some are worse. T-Mobile's coverage was pretty mediocre around my home, and that also had a huge impact on battery life.
My experience was with an Evo 4G. I tried closing / uninstalling all the apps, and I mostly just used the standard Google and HTC apps.
I sold the Evo and got an iPhone 4 and now I never have to think about the battery. During the few weeks I had the Evo I was caught a few times with a dead phone when I'd been planning on using the GPS to navigate somewhere at the end of the day. Not fun.
Yep it's all his fault. The flood of reviews and user feedback saying that high end Android battery life is poor is all part of Steve Job's reality distortion.
You probably installed a bad app on your phone that was draining its battery, and mis-attributed the problem to the device.