Why isn't mecanim not playing root motion is anim compression is off?

I can't get my quadruped to move in mecanim via it's root motion. Initially, my character was moving through the world, but with this really odd one frame hitch as the animation cycled. It looked like the character would jump back a few feet during the first frame of the cycle then continue on with it's animation.

While attempting to track down the hitch I decided to turn off animation compression. At this point the animation completely quit advancing. In mecanim the animation behaves as if the position "base into pose" was enabled. The creature will begin to advance towards the player character and then at the end of the cycle return to the original start position. The same behavior occurs when the animation compression is set to "Keyframe Reduction".

Interestingly enough none of these issues are visible in the animation preview window. Regardless of the compression options the creature will move through space and there's no visible pop as the animation repeats.

The character rig is flagged as generic and "Apply root motion" is enabled in the Animator component.