That's not necessarily true. Instead of just suspending you can make "suspend" a runlevel which includes a service that periodically wakes the phone up so apps

That's not necessarily true. Instead of just suspending you can make "suspend" a runlevel which includes a service that periodically wakes the phone up so apps can manage connections to servers that might push data to them. I wrote my own stuff that does that and I think many distros include something similar now.