Come on, now I'm a troll? The cost issue was more in relation to single-speed setups. But, let's not pretend like there aren't groupsets that cost twice what the Rohloff does. Or hubs that cost a fraction of that.
I'm also not going to ignore the fact that buying a bike I've never had an opportunity to ride is risky and inconvenient. I know I can order a bike. I could also move to Holland, but that wouldn't be very convenient, either.
But, that's not my original point. Which is:
Most American bike shops offer a disturbingly homogeneous selection.
I find it really hard to believe that an unmanipulated society of hundreds of millions of people would uniformly be very keen to ride the exact same bike as one another.