Your first point is relatively correct. Prices in Australia are hugely more expensive because of a combination of high wages and sheer distance from everything else.

The second point however is a stereotypical blanket statement. It's important to note that Anchor as a company designed and maintained the infrastructure of Github.com and now does the same thing for testflightapp.com; Both of which are high profile startups each of whom have traffic numbers orders of magnitude higher than most Australian hosting providers see across their entire network.

In the end, quality hosting isn't just about the hardware (linode, rackspace), but highly skilled engineers who can architect and provide solutions that don't 'just work' now, but scale into the future.