GNOME seriously needs to have it's good ole' battery monitor looked at. While it's basically functional, it has some serious issues design-wise. I don't think anyone had realised they have to deal with portability when they originally coded it up. I'm also not sure how well it deals with multiple batteries. I started drawing up a design for a new battery applet in my head.

One with an abstraction layer, so that all it has to do is pick the appropriate module for retrieving the battery info. At the same time, support could be added for things like showing the remaining time (wouldn't that be useful?) or adding code to the main battery class to do our own time calculations, or draw capacity over time graphs (mmm, feature creep).
I intend to keep the same look on the bar as it's always had (I really like that look). Though I think I will get rid of a lot of the random options it has in it's (if they're required they can go in gconf).

Here is a mockup I did of what I think the status dialog should look like: