I will say, I was helping a friend pick out a bike (before I really got back into it) and at Target, you had the Schwinns and you had everything else (Magna, NeXT, etc). Even to my relatively untrained eye, the Schwinns were clearly higher quality than everything else they stocked once one took the time to take the bike off the rack and examine its design and components.

So from what I've seen I tend to agree with Mike. Schwinns may not be the best bikes on the market, but they may well be the best bikes in their segment of the market - a notch or three above their department store competitors.

And the bikes sold at places like Performance qualify as Real Bikes by most anyone's standards. (You can get $2300 carbon-fiber framed road bikes, etc...)