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You are basically right on how the detection works. The re_kinect_object_detector detection uses SURF features from the camera image. It also compares the depth information from the Kinect for the feature points with the model to discard implausible correspondences. You can find a (rather short) description here. Note that this means that a badly aligned model will give bad detection results.

Our intent was to provide a fast and computationally cheap way to create object models. So as you probably noticed, the detection rate depends quite heavily on object properties like the texture of the object and the glossyness of the surface. We had good detection rate on a range of ~0.7m to 1.2m.

You might want to try the detection with the model for the game that comes with Kinect cameras (the model has the id "videogames.kinectadventures" in the DB).

Also note that the object recording and -detection is somewhat a side project of RoboEarth stuff. We recently restructured the wiki page to reflect that.