What negatives besides battery life does mirrorless have?
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Well there's a few:
1) Battery life - yep if you're running live view the whole time then the battery life is going to always be worse than the same battery technology in a comparable DSLR. This can be quite a significant aspect for people if they are shooting all day and can lead to a real world cost in requiring more spare batteries for extended shoots.
2) Video lag - video is not "as" fast as the mirror screen when it comes to fast moving subjects, fast moving camera and very fine movements. The blurring it can render can also be different so panning and moving can be trickier to work with whilst with the mirror setup any blurring from fast movement is purely natural as your eye would see it. Whilst this is an area that will always steadily improve its still not quite there yet technology wise.
3) Bendy details in video. Because of the way most DSLR's read video from their sensors they read it in lines not in the whole screen at once. This leads to thinks like bending helicopter blades when they are moving fast and other similar oddities with fast moving subjects and situations. Again this has improved over time, but won't fully improve until the way sensors work - ergo when the camera reads data from the whole sensor in one go instead of line by line.
4) Weight and size. This is more an issue for bigger lenses. Right now many mirrorless bodies are marketed on being smaller than DSLRs. Therefore they keep being small. Which is great if you're using small lenses on them; but if you've got yourself a fullframe mirrorless and now want to start putting 400mm lenses on the front you're going to start finding that the smaller and more compact body isn't as easily held against the body and the lighter weight makes the setup more likely to be front heavy.
5) Balance. If you're using the screen on the back your balance and posture is already harmed. With a short lens its fine, but with bigger and heavier lenses you don't want the camera at arms length. Now you'll say but some mirrorless have viewfinders on them and that's true, but then you're not really saving much in space nor design over a traditional mirrorless setup (and on some the top side viewfinder is an extra attachment so comes with extra cost).
6) Missed trick - this isn't really a negative nor a positive but a personal observation of mine. Cameras are TERRIBLE in terms of ergonomics. It's a hangover from when they had film inside that has never changed. It's still a flat rectangular box that you hold to your face (which even in many Asian countries, still has a very 3D profile and is not a flat surface). In my view the big missed trick was a chance to seriously step up the game in terms of camera ergonomics and design. Heck as you only need the sensor behind the camera there's no reason for the rest of the camera to need to be behind the lens itself. They could easily have made the whole camera more like a cradle design, letting you move the end of the lens back toward your shoulder and have a viewfinder slide out along half way. Again my thoughts here are with bigger, heavier lenses, but even shorter ones would benefit from improved ergonomics and the freedom of design that is accorded with a liveview based camera.
Now granted many of these are issues that will go away in time. Even battery life will go away once battery technology reaches a point where the difference in performance makes little real world meaning to most users. However right now I feel that these issues are still present for some users and we can see that big camera makers agree otherwise mirrorboxes would have vanished very fast.
Of course with mirrorless you can do away with mirrorslap; with mechanical failure of components; with a shorter lens rear to sensor distance etc... There's loads of bonuses and for many situations the negatives are not an issue. For some they are and for sports, action, wildlife and such similar subjects these are legitimate concerns. I also wonder if astophotography also suffers in so much as it might result in increased unit heat because the whole time the sensor is recording its also outputting the liveview feed (thus running a whole series of additional components which can put up the heat and increase battery drain)
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