This implies that you can, sitting at a table with a pint, come up with the key patentable ideas for the 40 hour batteries. The odds rather favor the people building batteries in earnest, don't they?
No, because this is not a case of A vs. B. It's A vs. all the Bs, Cs, Ds, &c patenting stuff.
So sure, a company building a battery has a good chance of coming up with an enforceable patent. But given thousands of people trying to patent battery-ish ideas and many that aren't immediately related to batteries, the odds favour one of them coming up with something that receives a patent and is vaguely related to whatever the battery manufacturer is doing.
Remember, a patent is a sword but not a shield. Just because you patent an idea and make something with that idea, you cannot assume that nobody else has a patent that applies to your "patented" idea. They may have patented some other part of the process for manufacturing your "invention" or they may have a patent for an underlying component of your process even though you have patented a novel way to apply their patented idea.
Please let go of the idea that patenting something is a license to actually do something tangible with your idea. It is not: It is actually a license to interfere with other people doing something with your idea.
In the modern patent business, the "odds" favor the first party to encounter a particular problem in their field of art. If you're lucky enough to encounter a problem first, you can patent the first obvious solution(s) that come to mind, and effectively own the field later.
This is why nonobviousness was supposed to be a criterion for granting patents, and why we're all worse off now that the USPTO has effectively abandoned it.
