Boy, it looks like our whole company is responding here. As a former "real" tech, and long time service manager of a long time Ricoh dealer and relatively new Kyocera Mita dealer, my opinion is that over all, the Kyocera products are much more reliable, have much longer PM cycles and require much less service time for both the infrequent emergency calls and PM's. Bottom line...much cheaper to service!
Although the 2035 is an improvement over it's predecessors (350, 1035) it's not a herritage that I would be proud of! Of course there can be specific features that would dictate the Ricoh over the Kyocera Mita, but if what your customer wants to do is copy, print or scan in a manner that 95% of end users do, then for me the Kyocera products are the clear winner.
And as far as copy quality falling off after the first PM, we haven experienced this, but since the PM cycle is 500K, we haven't done too many PM's to date. With the Ricoh one would have done at least 3 PM's in the same interval, each of which would take at least 1 1/2 hours and the copy quality woouldn't be too good before each was done.
Don't get me wrong, I still think the Ricoh products are good and in some ways better than the Kyocera Mita. But if I had a friend who wanted to buy a 35-40 ppm copier, I know what I would recommend.