For Karait,

Kaup is in Aschaffenburg, so in Bayern, correct, but not in Munich: the cost of work there is not different than in any other part of West Germany.
In any case, in Germany more than the price is the quality one of the most important factor for anything related to the machine industry, and from my point of view the quality of Kaup is at the moment one of the best, together with the customer service.
If you have ever dealed with the Kaup service in Germany you will know how efficient it is, on the contrary Cascade doesn't have such an extensive customer service: the engineers on the road are much less compared to the competitors.

I'm not an expert for the Polish market, but for the few contacts that I had, I have noticed a strong attention to the price (clearly the economy is not running as the one in Germany), but also to the service.
You are right on Cascade "the entire documentation (catalogues etc) you can download from their webpage", but they don't have a local technical support in Poland, while Bolzoni, for example, is developing a big network in Poland, you just have to search on Forkliftaction the article of Thursday, 18 Aug 2011 "Bolzoni Auramo Polska moves"
...Today, over 10 people work at the new 600 sqm (6,458 sqft.) Lublin office. The new building houses the marketing, sales, financing, after-sales and service departments. Additional space at the facility will be used to stock new and used attachments....

Another problem that I see for Cascade, is that they have a lot of changing in contact persons. In some areas of Germany there are since several years always the same salesmen, but in some other areas the persons change too often: in Germany, in this field, the persons like to have always the same contact and some stability. You can like it or not, but this is the German Industrial colture and mentality.