When I worked at a bike shop, the owner used to keep an old copy of CR around. It had a comparison of bicycles that hammered one that we sold. Unfortunately, it was a false comparison if you looked at the component groups and the fact that they'd apparently gotten an improperly tuned and assembled bike. Final assembly and tuning are done by the local shop not by the manufacturer, but CR had painted our product line as inferior based on a bad assembly.
Now I take everything they say with a grain of salt because they had no expert knowlege of bikes.