It's not fair to Ferrari, to need a comparison with a Kia to 'prove' some kind of superiority.
Or is it not really that much better, only more expensive ... 
Cheers,
Bart
Friend of mine used to buy small-run sports cars. At one point he had a Renault Alpine and I commented on the fall-apart quality of the interior. His response: "A door handle on a Ford gets more engineer design time than the engine of an Alpine". Well, maybe it wasn't true of the engine, but it was true of the whole interior.
It's clear that Canon and other consumer manufacturers invest a lot of work by very qualified engineers in improving the functionality of every part of their cameras. This engineering work is amortised across tens of millions of sales. Saying their work is worthless because the cameras are cheap is ridiculous, snobbish and just plain dumb: A good design, the right grip shape, or a good algorithm remains good regardless of the sales-price.
In fact, low-end tends to be better made than high-end quite often: No company can afford to see its low-end product fail and generate a mass recall.
Edmund
PS: I know a lot of smart people who drive our cheap european compacts in town - because that's what works best in crowded european cities. And I invite our MF friends to grab a Canon Rebel, play with it for an hour, take a couple of snaps of their four year old and then write here whether it is the Rebel or the world-famous Phase One DF which is the better-focusing and generally better designed camera. I know that when I got a used Rebel for $200 I couldn't believe how this shoddy piece of plastic worked so well, and when I stuck a $50 50mm f1.8 prime on it I got portrait images that easily matched anything I could coax out of a luxury compact camera, or even achieve with a 5D or equivalent with a kit zoom lens.
