Well, unless all US companies so far have only used this argument as a strawman, it's difficult to release games across several markets due to the individual legal regulations.
This should not be an issue for most of the EU, because regulations are quite similar in many countries, but it would become an issue when dealing with other markets as well.
Additionally there's the translation issue: to cover most of Europe it's feasible to provide an English, French and Russian translation, Polish sometimes replacing Russian due to 1) the alphabet (you need an additional font for Russian, Polish only has a few special variations) and 2) the piracy problem usually associated with Russia.
When including the Americas, Spanish needs to be taken into account (the Spanglish market may not be as important, but that way you can also cover the Spanish speaking part of Europe) and once you go beyond the western world Korean, Japanese and Chinese (again, piracy issue) become neccessary (all of which require a seperate alphabet and keyboard layout).
And lastly there's the Middle East, which is a whole topic by itself.
A company will nearly always have the local market as primary target. For a European company that means foremost the German, French and UK markets.
As far as I know the Eastern European markets as well as the Spanish/Italian/etc markets tend to be treated like a red-haired stepchild in most cases (unless, obviously, the company is situated in one of those countries).
American companies tend to be similarily "nationalistic". Especially in the MMO market -- Europe oftenly has only two or three language specific servers (English, French, German; although this seperation can develop on its own) and in most cases the European tech support is seperated from the US tech support entirely and outsourced to a company that is given no access to the underlying source code at all and sometimes doesn't even have admin access to the servers; if they can handle requests in more languages than broken English, they're already one of the better tech support companies.
Lastly there's always the difference between the actual markets: Japanese games rarely make it to Europe or North America because they're deemed too exotic (remember that mosquito simulator for the console? It took strong player support to convince the publisher to export that game to places outside Asia), German strategy games are historically more complex and slower-paced than elsewhere (the eco sims of the 80s and 90s being a great example, although the trend has changed in the last years), British games tend to have a different humor than American games, etc.
Either way, I do agree that what the publishers of this game have pulled off is rather retarded, mostly because of their empty promises and delays (I suspect they may not have expected that much interest from the English audience, which would mean they weren't intentionally screwing up, they just panicked).
