It's getting to be like with soap powder.
Not sure if this is out of date, but there used to be just two major manufacturers of soap powder, each with a huge number of different brand names. It didn't matter very much what was in the boxes - they found that every new product took some market share away from their competitor, even if it was identical to one of their other products apart from a new fancy box.
It's not quite the same thing here because the 1000D is a bit different, but it looks as if both Canon and Nikon are introducing more 'budget' models which don't bring anything new to the party but may just grab some more market share.