I think Mark is referring to the "Toolbar" "Menu" widget inside the "Top Bar" of a "Visual Perspective". For each menu element there is a tick box option "Start right alignment". Im using this for a BSV in 8.1 and it is working for me.
I note in the DIV for the button the HTML applies a class k-align-right
<div class="k-split-button k-align-right" tabindex="0"
Mark perhaps you have an issue in your CSS that is causing k-align-right to be skipped?
When I use Chrome inspector to check what CSS is being applied I says its using following from kendo.common-boostrap.css
.k-toolbar>.k-align-right {
float: right;
}

