I think it all comes down to the brand name and differences in opinion. Many people have had bad luck with one brand or another and have entirely switched and practically refuse to look at other brands. This could be due to something on the service side they were unhappy with or the engine itself. Some people are vain enough that only the "Xerox" brand will do. At this point I think anyone that's still in business has to be selling a reasonably good piece of equipment or they wouldn't be in business.
I will agree that Xerox charges too much for their gear. However after looking at the Ricoh 900, KM6501hc, and Canon c9075 we decided the Xerox 700 looked better. Now don't get me wrong the other engines put out great quality. However WE liked the look of the prints from the Xerox better. Were we willing to pay more for it? Yes we were, due to several concerns with service from our local reps on the other machines. The only brand we haven't owned in the last 10 years is the KM so we know the different dealers in the area. The other thing we looked at was how knowledgeable the service/support staff was at each dealer. We demo'd all the machines and the Xerox tech who trained us on the machine (hands-down) actually had knowledge of things like color profiling, workflow, color management, proofing for larger color printers/presses, etc. He knew the equipment including the RIP and was willing to spend several days getting us up and running. The other dealers knew the basics of how to run the "copier" end of the machines but knew next to nothing on the RIP end of the machine other than setting up the IP address and driver on a PC. Over the demo period we actually learned and knew more than the service monkeys in this regard. When we called them out to discuss matching spot colors or color quality we were used to adjusting and seeing on press they were clueless. This may be different depending on the area you live in...you make the choice if spending the extra money is worth it or not. At the end of the day we thought the quality off the majority of the machines we looked at was great compared to the others and if price was the only concern we would probably have gone with one of the other dealers. For us getting the training on the machine from someone who knew what it was capable of rather than stumbling around for a month learning the ropes made the difference. Of course on a higher value piece (Xerox 7002, KM 8000 etc.) the price difference is a lot greater and we might be advised to spend our extra money on a specialist that costs a tenth of the difference.
I hope your local dealers are much better than ours were. If KM and Canon in particular want to sell this level of equipment rather than the low-end office copiers they need to make sure their dealers are capable of supporting it before letting them loose. Xerox may have the same problem with some of it's dealers, but ours was excellent and it felt like we were dealing with someone who knew the ins and outs of production printing versus a copier salesman. I realize though that if you are familiar with the front-end (e.g. Fiery, Creo) and the color/screening/profiling tools available that the knowledge of the dealer may be of a tertiary concern. We were coming from a Canon C1, Xerox 250, 12 equipment package and felt as though we were not up to speed on getting these digital machines to perform at their capabilities.
I will admit I'm excited to see what the KM 8000 is capable of and the pricing structure for clicks, we're looking at opening a 4th location and are going to be evaluating some larger print engines for it, our last round of evaluations was about 2 years ago so I cant wait to see some of the new stuff and it's capabilities.