The problem with that selection method is the guitar has to be set-up well, or it will sound like crap, and may play equally bad. Plus, through no fault of it's own, it may not have the right PU's in it to match the wood. Swap them out, or maybe just swap magnets, and it may become the best-sounding guitar in the whole store.
My theory is that every guitar needs a set-up and tweaking to sound its best, and that if you just play the guitars in a store, you're picking the one that happens to have the best set-up and PU/wood match (and strings that aren't dead yet), not necessarily the best guitar. The hard thing to gauge is potential, and probably 90% of the best guitars get bypassed for superficial reasons (bad intonation, strings too high, PU's too low, rusty strings, etc).
