"batch, batch, batch" No longer valid?

With D3D9 class hardware, you want to keep your draw calls below 300 per frame. At 60FPS, that's 18,000 per second.

You can go above that, but then you're going to start using up a significant amount of CPU time doing nothing but submitting draw calls to the driver.

Well it's always depended on what exactly you're doing in your app. Remember that the point of batching is to reduce CPU-side overhead. This means that if your game is GPU-bound, batching won't have any effect. In fact if your method of batching causes more GPU-side overhead (like with shader constant instancing, for example) you might actually decrease performance with batching. Also remember that the same code might be CPU-bound or GPU-bound depending on the CPU and GPU being used (or even the version of the driver being used).

So yeah in the general case, batching is still a good thing since it's usually not practical to render lots of geometry unless you batch it.