I am also now victim of the dreaded google services battery drain issue
However, I found a workaround. From various posts, I thought that problem is only if one needs access to location constantly. At few places, people also mentioned that 'device only' mode or 'location off' resolves the problem. I did not get anywhere exact behavior and proper explanation of the problem. So I am trying to explain it here.
I kept the location off initially, and there was no battery drain, in fact battery life was much better than the JB.
However, I started google maps once and enabled high accuracy location once and then after that, my phone was not able to sleep. As you can see from the screenshot, after the short gps activity bar, phone is awake for all the time for next 3-4 hours.
When phone was all the time awake after that, I tried different things like location - device only mode, disabling location and making location on and off multiple times. Nothing helped, phone was constantly awake and battery was draining fast.
After this, I restarted my phone(you can see vertical line break in the screenshot) with location off. After the restart however, phone could go into sleep and no more awake(please refer screenshot). Problem solved!
So my conclusion is, when facing battery drain, turn off location and restart device. This would solve the problem. Note that 'only' turning off location does NOT resolve this problem. You need phone restart after disabling location.
Kitkat as such is stable but once you start location/gps, phone would never sleep until you restart.
For me this workaround is acceptable as I use GPS once in a while only. And use maps only once in a while for navigation. So if you want to go to kitkat, see if you can compromise on GPS use. Else JB is your best option right now. Third option is to disable google services which is the worst option in my opinion.
Advantages of Kitkat is, it has very good battery life mostly because of batching of data transfers. I would say around 10-15% SOT increase.
Hope this helps at least a few people who are confused about upgrading to kitkat.