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The power hungry bit is probably powering in the GPS to attach a location.

On Android at least, getting a GPS fix takes many seconds, during which the CPU cannot sleep. For that reason, a default Android phone won't power up the GPS for hours on end sometimes. Yet this find-my feature might require a GPS position every few minutes whenever a new tag is seen. That's a lot of extra power.

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Most users have Find My turned on for their devices so that if they are lost or stolen they can find them.

Find My on your phone already has to get an approximate location, and it does so fairly frequently (since you can track somewhat realtime).

So having an Air Tag piggy back on the same mechanism won't cost a whole lot in terms of having to power on the geolocation capabilities.

If they were to officially support this use-case of arbitrary data transmission, you could also default to non-GPS-located transactions, which would save that power except in cases where the user has specified that they do need locations.

Also, coarse location (cellular and wifi) uses basically no power, and might be good enough for an awful lot of applications.

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