I still have the battery problem. The Sales rep and Genius's responses were that I could return it (or by inference, sell it) if I was unhappy with the charging time, as it is known to take a very long time.
A fourtysomething battery cycle user reported to me that it is notably lower, around what Astrohouse mentioned but I wonder if anyone's been nerdy enough to time the process properly.
Since I stopped using the Air as my main ultraportable the number of cycles gone through in a week (twentysomething the last time I checked) has drastically reduced, so for me to arrive at this supposedly magic number is now probably a long way away.