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Anonymous: certainly peer review is an important part of the publication process...but it's not something that the publisher contributes. The peer reviewers are typically volunteers. So the money we pay journals simply doesn't go into the peer review process.
Sure, you can say that the money goes to paying the editor to pick some peer reviewers, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that's the only way to arrange things. For instance, suppose we have an open-access journal with a set list of reviewers, organized by subject matter. When you submit a paper, you select the subject, and a random subset of the reviewers for that subject are assigned to do the reviews. Many conferences in my field actually do something like this in order to select conference papers and posters.
You could even do something more sophisticated, where you analyze the text in the paper and select other researchers who (in the judgment of the algorithm) write about similar topics. Will this be as good as a live editor? Maybe, maybe not. But it couldn't be much worse, and it would eliminate the need to pay a publisher altogether.