4.5 hours on battery surprised me - cool that it's built in, but yeah these things are power hungry. 25-35W kinda surprised me.

I guess it makes sense, space is a long way away after all...

Distance alone isn’t the real issue (newer Pixel phones can talk to GEO, which is 100 times farther out than Starlink in LEO!), data rate over distance is.

It's not inherently because of space, it's because phased array antennas are just very power hungry. Most of the link budget is coming from the satellites huge antenna, the mini has a comparatively tiny aperture

They have to be able to actively melt snow too, which makes the draw much higher.