Its still there, just not on the menu bar. Try Activity Monitor/Energy. The battery graph, time remaining etc is at the bottom.

What?

You can turn on percentage in the menu bar, and there's several different usage graphs in multiple places.

If you want the actual milliamp-hours, load cycles, battery temperature, age, or even battery serial number, there's an api for that. You can use for example coconutBattery and get whatever data you want.

They used to but it was as hopelessly unreliable as the old file transfer progress bars.

If you tap on the battery icon on the top strip it tells you exactly that.

Isn't there a Usage History graph in system preferences?

FOr the sake of simplicity?