Agreed. I've been trying to understand their reasoning for later offering a separate US box or US retail service and I can't come up with much, particularly since they've already allowed NA players to buy EU boxes and play on EU servers.

Normally the only reason you offer separate, parallel services is to maximize price points in different territories. That requires some sort of registration code/IP address/credit card geolocation. I can't see them implementing that AFTER allowing everyone to buy and play globally.

Which is nothing to say that opening a US server would also seemingly be devastating the EU server population...