I totally agree Scott, there is no point in competing with ourselves by creating duplicate content on our own site, it dilutes link equity, user focus and our time. I know a lot of people that will freak out about having things like manufacturer descriptions on review sites or even publishing new stories. I don’t think there is much harm in either of those.
Obviously it would be better to rewrite it and dense up the keywords, but if I were say scraping 1,000 product descriptions, I would much rather throw them up straight from the manufacturer and then slowly work through them adding keywords later.