I just went out on a ride with my friend who got his reign (i am a giant dealer).
Relatively easy ways to drop the weight on the reign;
Sell the Race Face cranks and buy the 05 shimano XT. Save about 100g.
Sell the WTB saddle and pick up a Selle Italia Flight TT, save about 120g
Run Legeater pedals.
Lighter disc brakes like XTR. The disc brakes that come on the reign appear to be hayes mag+, but upon closer inspection you see that they are not even the mag levers and the only aspects of the brakes that are like the mag+ are the wavy rotors and the carbon evers, otherwise they are not really the mag+, they just look like it.
Lighter seatpost like a thompson. The race face carbon post is pretty trick, but carbon doesn't really save any weight here. Save about 50g.
Use an XT rear cassette. The 970 cassette that comes stock weighs about 320g, I weighed my new M760-series cassette 11-32 at the shop yesterday and it was 264g. So about 55g weight saved here.
I'm also sure the 2.3 tires are not that light, the wheels felt fairly heavy despite the weight on those mavics being pretty darn light for the wheelset.
So you can save about a pound here ignoring any savings you get with the tires and not including any weight saved by different brakes. That's not too bad and it puts the weight in line with other similer bikes. Usually when someone claims their trail bike is less than 30lbs they are way off, because it's hard to get a 7-8lb framed bike that is going have a wheelset that weighs at least 1700-1800g to weigh less than 30lbs. I've done it with my FXR and gotten it down to around 29lbs, that's with a lighter shock than the curnutt, mavic 519 rims, eggbeaters, a 4.9lb fork, the 05 xt cranks, a 175g saddle, etc. In other words lots of $$$ and some sacrifices to get it down that much. The reign is not particularly heavy for what it is, it's a 6" bike with a nearly-6" fork. It's simply not that easy to get these bikes down to some insanely low weight, without putting on super-expensive products like the maveric DUC32 and triple Ti eggbeaters.
Riding the bike today, the suspension felt pretty good. The manitou fork has dropouts that are cast wrong and has to be sent back for that and the IT not extending. This ruined the ride today but hopefully paul gets a better fork and can really tell whether he likes it or not. The geometry is pretty far off claimed too, 17.75" chainstay, 45.75" wheelbase (no, these are not typos).