Old and new Campy 10 speed compatibility

The thing is that I think that most modern, rigid (no suspension) bicycle frames, whether made from steel, aluminium or carbon, have few, if any, patentable technologies on them. It's your garden variety double-diamond frame with a bunch of interfaces that are either over a century old prior art(e.g. insertion-type seatpost, threaded BB, press-fit headset), or modern open-standards (e.g. BB30, BB90, IS disc-mount etc.). And bicycling is not exactly at the forefront of material or manufacturing technology either. There just isn't a whole lot to patent. There are obviously exceptions, but I think this is generally true. Sure, the makers will throw in a bunch of curves and bulges nowadays too, to make things visually interesting, but most of these are not patentable either, since they rarely fulfil the general criteria for patent - new, non-obvious and useful.

Excellent post, and saved me from typing a (not as good) response to this :-

Pinarello charges £2k because of the price of r&d and everything else...sure the actual product might only cost 200 dollars to make, but thats not what you are paying for...next you will be telling me a car should cost the price of the materials and the labour to put it together.

I'd imagine the R&D costs for Pinarello are minimal (the UCI makes sure of that), the money will be tied up in branding, marketing and team sponsorship keeping their profile as a premium brand

Edit - Also, gawd bless Campag. I've got to go through this experience in the near future as a 2008 Veloce user. Anyone know about chainset compatibility ? Would an 11spd Athena chainset work ok in a 10spd set up ?