I don't buy that (outside of copyright licensing). Especially for anything cloud based. As a Canadian, we don't have a choice but to expand to include the US early on (since it's a market 10x bigger) and I've not really seen that become a stumbling block.
Because you don't have a choice, you faced the related issues right away and found them not a big deal. Most US businesses do have a choice to just ignore these issues completely, because their internal market is big enough to sustain expansion for a long time.
(although when it comes to audio-video, @navait is correct: it's a legal minefield.)
