I think perception slowly start to shift, Chinese products used to be considered nothing less more than cheap crap, it is no longer true anymore.
A brand like Xiaomi has ambition, a lot, the Mipad is a quality product, few reviews gave it the credit it deserves (DF review was unbiased a couple others too), for most big mainstream sites it was a good cheap Chinese toy, I'm not sure about how to read that: lack of marketing money from Xiaomi, marketing money from other manufacturers, prejudices if not xenophonic sentiment? It is not my point.
The Mi Pad is high end, replace Xiaomi by Google, slap Kitkat on it, and the press would have gladly sang its merits to the world as the Nexus 8.
Good retina display, great SOC, 2GB of RAM, SD card, good camera, etc. Imo it is every bit as high as the Nexus 9, no matter the big Google marketing push. It is an iPad mini 2 "killer" whatever that means.
Truth be told, I think that "real" Android high end is impersonate through the Galaxy Tab 10.5 S. It is almost too high end, performances are great (no longer the best), the screen is awesome, actually its "high end"ness hurts it as resolution so high that you are likely to watched at upscaled content.
I also see the "high end"ness in Sony tablets (or Apple on the other side).
Notwithstanding Google impressive marketing push, the Nexus 9 is in no way "the" Android tablet.
EDIT
It is in your mind and in quite a few others, marketing push as been strong (months of Nexus and Android L, again MONTHS ), it is also interesting to see how that device is reviewed, it is more than often pit against Apple products, it fails here harder than reviewers make it sounds imo and I'm pretty adverse to Apple environment but that is not my point, the thing is it also fails against quite a few devices in the Android realms.
The halo surrounding given products is marketing/brand related, king are not born but made nowadays. It would take a lot more than specs and software to take on Apple prestige, Google understood that pretty well.