anyway of getting a percentage in your battery status?

Other than rooting and using a custom rom like Cyanogenmod I don't know.

 

curvefish has a simple battery app that will give you the % in the widget

 

There are a few apps that will put the percentage on the left side of your notification bar. If you are talking about adding a percentage to the battery icon that is on the right side you have to have a ROM that supports that feature.

 

Battery Indicator was one of the first apps I got, tried others, always go back to this.

 

Beautiful widgets, system info widget, and others all have an option to display this in the bar, but as others have said,not on the system icon.

 

I have Quicker, which does a range of interesting things, including the battery % in the notification area.