Here's my findings from yesterday. I had to go to a city I travel to frequently which has a lot of low signal areas on the way. Normally I just pass through them so I'm only in them for a few minutes as I'm driving through. But yesterday I had to spend around 2 hours in that low signal area on the way to the city. I spent about an hour of that time surfing the web and making some calls. Where my OG Pixel had issues keeping connected to data or dropping calls, you wouldn't have noticed on this newer Pixel. It was like I'm at home on WiFi. After visiting the aforementioned city and coming home, I had 68% remaining, whereas on my old Pixel, I would have around 40% left, and as I said before, I normally don't spend any significant time in that low signal area. I finally put it on the charger 7hrs later, adding another 3hrs of SOT and it still had 29% battery remaining.
I have to say, so far the battery alone was worth the upgrade. It's almost like I can't kill the battery on this thing. The camera is also an upgrade, and the speakers, while not glaringly louder, are better in that I don't have to worry about covering them when using the phone in landscape orientation, which I did a lot to the point it was noticeably annoying. I also noticed something after MKBHD's review, I am using Assistant more now because of the squeeze to activate feature. I figured it would be a gimmick that would be cool for a second and then forgotten about, but it actually is useful. It would be nice if they could expand it, adding more gestures to it, like different actions based on how hard you squeeze or multiple squeezes. And the fact that it's still easy to manage is great as well.
All in all, this was worth the price of admission IMHO, bezels be damned!