Cisco Small Business = Linksys.
If you want to pay more money for that bridges logo, you're welcome to do so. You are still getting a Linksys product, and you will still get Linksys hardware, software, and support. Not fundamentally any different or better than Netgear, D-Link, Trendnet, etc.
Cisco does make an 8-port 2960. If you really don't need more than 8 ports, but you really do need a managed switch, that's what you can buy. 2960s are good switches, and it's an entirely reasonable network design to standardize on them for your edges. So part of why you might be using them is not so much that you really need that switch to be a 2960 as it is that you really need all your edge switches to be standardized on one good platform. Whatever you save on capex buying cheaper switches, you'll spend more than that on management and diagnostic opex for failing to standardize.
You don't buy cheap Cisco, you don't buy cheap EMC, and you don't buy cheap Sun.
If it doesn't have a SSH CLI and a serial port (bonus points for RJ45 serial), and the CLI isn't at least a passable knock-off of the Cisco or Juniper CLI, it's not a real modern managed switch. If you can only manage it from a web page, that's what's called a "web-managed" or a "smart" switch. It's a crippled product made to fill the product line gap between real managed switches and unmanged switches. Web-managed switches are not necessarily bad, but you need to understand that you are not buying a managed enterprise product, you are buying a product whose entire point is for you to outgrow it.
Modelworks, it is true that most low-end to mid-range switches use the same chipsets, and the low-end ones rarely deviate much from the reference design, but it's usually a lot more than just a reflash to switch from one vendor's firmware to another. Everyone tweaks just a little - or cost reduces a lot - and that alone means device driver and hardware configuration parameter differences. The vendor-provided firmware is generally not built to be generic.