OK, there's definitely a problem.
I used my SP7 in the late morning off-charger. The battery went down to about 95%.
I left Wi-Fi on and closed the keyboard cover. Left it for a couple hours at least.
I come back and the device is warm and the battery is at 78%.
I restarted. Then I checked Task Manager. Windows Explorer is closed, yet it's using ~10% CPU.
I made sure battery saver was on after each time I booted.
WFT Microsoft.
UPDATE: OK well now it's back to "normal", which is to say, the thermals issue went away, as did the strangely active Windows Explorer.
Today I decided to pound the tablet and see what would happen. I started a little after 12:30 (before then I had been docked to record some video). I edited the video from 38 minutes to 25rendered it (granted, at 720p) on battery and that took me to just above 60 percent, at just before 3. Then I spent the afternoon and early evening (with breaks for meals) handling student emails, making a couple exercises, fiddling with my grading Excel spreadsheet, messing around in Stata ... and that lasted me until about a quarter after 8.
So including the video editing and rendering on my i7 Surface Pro 7, I got nearly 7 hours of intense work done. It feels about as good as my Surface Pro 5 in terms of battery life, except everything is faster. So yeah.
Granted this is just one day, etc. But it was one hell of a day.