Instead of pulling the validation message from the Title attribute, use the title in the formatted message. For people who are trying to write localized messages, this could be very beneficial since they can just replace the title with the correct field name and change the message in the options.errors just once for the localized error message.

   _extractMessage: function (input, ruleKey) {
        var that = this,
                customMessage = that.options.messages[ruleKey],
                fieldName = input.attr(NAME);

        customMessage = $.isFunction(customMessage) ? customMessage(input) : customMessage;

        return kendo.format(input.attr(kendo.attr(ruleKey + "-msg")) || input.attr("validationMessage") ||  customMessage || "", input.attr("title") || fieldName, input.attr(ruleKey));
    },