I've seen some of the run times here...
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/GigabeatRuntimeAs well as the 30 hour bench that was posted along with the tutorial on how to mod the Ipod 4 g battery...
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/GigabeatBatteryUpgradeWell, I tracked down a couple versions of that battery on eBay and found they were rated at 1200 mAh. Then I also found a battery from the same manufacture that was made for the Gigabeat series that is 1000 mAh.
So, would the Ipod battery likely give me a significant increase in battery life? There doesn't really seem to be a lot of difference between 1000 mAh and 1200 mAh. There's not really enough people mentioning which battery they used for me to really draw a solid conclusion but if I could assume the ones left blank are using the default battery, then the ipod batteries don't really seem to have that much of an edge. One 19 hr bench was even reportedly using a 830 mAh battery... So I'm even left to wonder how much it depends on usage, especially seeing a couple of results for the Ipod battery at only 15-20 hours.
In any case, it doesn't seem like it would be that complicated of a job to modify the Ipod battery but unless I'm actually going to be looking at a difference of 5 or 10 hours I don't think it's really worth it. Maybe I missed the point and the modification is just if you weren't able to find an original battery replacement?