[fjtorres]

This issue keeps coming up.
Yes, it sucks when a desirable product is not available to you or it costs more than in other markets.
But it is also true that each country sets its own competitive environment based onn local laws, wages, real estate prices, and competition rules.
Focusing solely on currency exchange rates to compare prices across markets simply leads to heartburn and offers no insight into the root causes of the pricing differential.

When it comes to ebook readers and tablets the US is, at this point in time, a highly competitive *high volume* market with several players and high visibility products competing primarily on price.
On the eink side, B&N is being particularly aggressive on pricing, significantly more than eee-vile Amazon. Amazon, being top-dog, volume-wise, seems comfortable with their two-tier pricing model and are under no great pressure to match B&N's moves. Sony and Kobo, having tied their fate to epub, don't have quite as much leeway. They *have* to match Nook pricing in the US.
Outside the US, there is no Nook to drive down epub reader prices and it is up to Kobo to be the low-cost bidder. To the extent that some people refuse to consider Kindle as a reader option (be it epub religion, economic nationalism, or whatever) they relieve Sony and the other epub players from having to sacrifice margin for market share. And this is without bringing in cost-of-doing-business issues or purchasing-power parity differentials.

For tablets, the US again is a "special" case.
For starters, the content side of the tablet equation is more abundant with the likes of Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, Prime, etc making Tablet purchases more attractive and increasing overall volume.
Then you have the two-way squeeze where Apple is sucking the air out of the high-end tablet market and the Amazon-B&N war is capturing the bulk of the low/mid-range market.
Finally, you have an excess of product from the generic Android vendors (Toshiba, Asus, Acer, etc) whose attempt to compete with Apple has left them sitting on entire warehouses of unsold product that has been moving only when deeply discounted. Just in the past few weeks we have seen Toshibas and other "name" 10in tablets selling in the $300-350 range.
Just as Sony dropping the T1 to $99 was the only move they left had if they intended to be relevant in that segment, so is dropping the Tablet S to $399 pretty much mandatory if they intend to seriously compete.
Now, I'm not that familiar with the aussie tablet market, but I'm pretty sure there is no local equivalent to the FIRE/Nook low-end contest, and I'm fairly sure no vendor is racking up sales by the million as FIRE and iPad did last month. Last I looked, the NYC metro area alone has about as much population as australia. Put another way, if you add up US iPad, Kindle, and Nook sales for december alone, it adds up to half the entire australian population. Volume matters as a way to distribute fixed costs, if nothing else.

I wouldn't be so sure Sony is intentionally gouging anybody.
As a company they operate under a premium pricing model that people will be willing to pay a hefty premium for the "SONY" name stenciled on the hardware. But nothing kills brand equity faster than demonstrable price gouging.
And Sony brand equity is frayed enough that they can't afford a reputation for gaugging any more than they can afford *not* to drop prices in the US.
They're just caught between two fires.
And the global economic system is simply way too dependent on the American consumer, which in the long run is good for nobody.
Then you have a
You have Nook and Nook color and FIRE sucking a lot of the air