State of their battery isn't the problem and the results are to be expected. The patches will cause slowdowns on any program that needs to make a lot of kernel calls. And synthetic benchmarks are mainly making kernel calls. So the results are no surprise and of zero real world value. If you want to benchmark you need to be doing real work and ditch the synthetic benchmarks.
Personally I've been running patched Linux kernels since the 3rd and haven't noticed any difference. Haven't tried any VM's yet though.