Agree, it's silly. Artificially hamstringing a vehicle in a test is kind of, not-so-smart. I don't understand why they don't just pick a similar ratio gear for all the bikes and roll-on in that gear. With the sweet, sweet shifting of the Concours gear box, it's not like dropping three gears very quickly is even a problem.
it's a matter of comfort. It's just a little test that tells the potential buyer if the vehicle has some get-up-and-go on top gear, to avoid having to down-shift. Just give gas and overtake.
The C14 has a loooooooooooong last gear. It's fourth gear is as long as 6th in a BMW K1300S. The discontinued K1300GT was always 2000 rpm above what the C14 at any usable speed and it was "histeric", sort to say, but it had a great roll-on time.
A few magazines compared the K1600GT in 6th (a "real" 6th in that bike, in which the vehicle achieved top speed, not a gear to save fuel) against the C14 in 5th (the speed in which you can reach top speed and also which they claimed was the highest gear that made sense to use on secondary roads), and the roll-on test showed the Kawasaki as the quicker one.
Whether we like it or not, the gearbox on the C14 is long, and secondary flies, as it comes from factory, maim the engine's potential.
As a side note, specially after I drove a few times the K1300S, I started noticing how "slow" (complaining on a stratospheric level) the C14 piles up speed when at, say, 120 mph in the Autobahn. So I decided that when that 911 finally got out of my way, I'd shift down to 4th. Well, let's say that I never again thought of my bike as slow...
