Battery Life of my MacBook Pro

My MacBook Pro is pretty new - I got it in July of 2012, so it's not even a year old. I know Macs are supposed to have reliable and lengthy battery lives. However, I am getting a maximum of 4 (? - maybe a tad more or less) hours of usage each time, before having to plug it into the charger.
Also, when checking the battery percentage, when it's fully charged for example, it will tell me that the computer has around 7 hours of life left, and I've found that this is never the realistic case.
Any ideas on what is going on? Is this normal?
Thanks!

The battery estimate is going to go up and down depending on how hard the CPU, backlight, wireless radios, and storage drives are working. If I render video my battery estimate will go down to like 1.5 hours, but when rendering is over and the machine is idle it can go up to 6 hours estimated but will probably end up 4 hours actual.
Apple's site says "up to" 7 hours battery but that is surfing the web using specific wireless and brightness settings. 4 hours sounds about right for moderate actual work. It's what I get on my year-old MacBook Pro (battery health 98%). You can exceed 8 hours if you have a dim backlight, light usage, and no networking, like when you're on a late-night plane flight.
You can do things like monitor CPU usage. For example, you might think you're innocently surfing the web lightly, but if you have a couple of browser tabs open in the background and there are Flash ads cycling on them, that could take down your battery life real quick even though they are not visible.

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