That's a fair point, but I expect one could replace 'Outside the US' with 'Outside the G7' and the idea would still have merit. There are a lot of people in this world that simply don't have purchasing power anywhere near what is available to the everyman in any one of those countries and it's not inconceivable that a decent number of them would like to compose music in the way Live enables.

I think the Lite version is pretty affordable and often comes bundled with some cheapish audio hardware. That said, max4live is only bundled within the suite version afaik

They just pirate it.

US customers have Sweetwater installment plans.

Gotcha. Makes sense!