Meh. Recognizing that business it out to make money and consumer is out to save money.... YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
It all comes down to profit margins. So a company say Motobecane or Trek or <insert major bike brand> will spec out a product to the frame mfg with profit margin in mind. Selects the quality of the frame choice offered by the mfg and it gets made. Therefore to me a Trek 1.x pretty much have little difference in terms of frame quality to BD's Motobecane or Schwinn or whatever in that price bracket.
The stuff you pay for when purchasing a LBS bike which Treks or Specialized can only be found are after sales support, fitting and a license to pile hate on BD. And of course someone has to pay the marketing up at Trek/Cannondale World Headquarters.
They should just be called Kinesis Bikes instead.

If you trawl Kinesis' website they offer lots of frame standards. It depends on how much ultimately are you the consumer to contribute to the profit margin of the bike company. Seems pretty simple business model to me that is employed from your Apple iMac to the fancy Whirlpool refrigerator that tells you when you need to buy milk. Oh wait... do you know that the very operating system that you are using was put together by a bunch of folks in India?