It's funny that you say that about Bose. Sony used to be that way too, everyone would go OOOHH sony, and pay huge prices for the name, but when you looked at the specs on their stereo equipment .vs. many of the other name brands, jvc, hitachi, etc, many times the specs were a lot lower, but the price was way higher, just for the name 'sony'. Nakamichi was the same way, big bucks for pretty crappy stuff really.
I know bose was one of the names that people went goo goo over, they tried to act like bose was 'the' standard. I never did like their stuff, their speakers were very poor performers actually, they gobbled a lot of power for their relative output.
Aaron