thats nice of them ... I'd love to be one of 3 distributors that represent them in AU and then get my lunch cut.
I think I've just lost my appetite.
I think that has always been GoPro's business model so any distributer should have been aware of it when they decided to ditribute the product. In the early days you always had to send any faulty units back direct to gopro anyway (at your own cost) which gave no incentive for buying local - i.e No real local warranty.
Did I buy my Hero1 locally - Yes plus a mulitude of accessories. Was the deal too good to pass up on buying direct for the Hero2 with free LCD backpack, I believe it was (with shared postage). Will I wait for the Wifi bacpac to be approved and available locally, Most likely.
With them now available not just from specialty sport camera places and now available at every second camera shop (Teds, Paxtons, Camerawarehouse, Digidirect, etc) and JB-HiFi it wouldn't be worth it for most people to buy direct from GoPro and the I want it now attitude makes it even more unlikely that people will buy direct from GoPro or from overseas when they can walk into a shop and walk away with the product.
At the end of the day It's all about choices though.
If you want to buy local why don't you hit up someone like sportscamera.com.au for a group buy price, current price on an outdoor edition is $375 (same price as direct with postage).