I have been wrestling with this issue for some time. As far as we have been made aware, if a Page Title exceeds 70 charactes not only will this text not appear in the Search Results, but Google will also not index text after this limit.. But Andrew do you believe this too not be the case, and in fact having perhaps longer Page Titles with Long-Tail Keyword targeting is a good way to improve ranking?
This article seems to agree with this as well:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166510/4-SEO-Recommendations-to-Target-the-Long-Tail
We had begun to reduce Page Title Character lengths across site but we are in 2 minds whether to do so now!