Yeah Australia is a huge landmass...with less than 1/10 the population of the US. Your telcos don't have to cover vast swaths of uninhabitable land and only focus on where your tiny population (in relation to the physical size of the country) lives. The same was done easily in Canada, another massive country in size with 35 million people. Switching from CDMA to GSM was not difficult or extremely expensive when both countries decided to do it. It will not be hugely difficult to in turn go to LTE. Verizon has to cover a huge land mass, with a huge population as well. Switching from CDMA to GSM earlier in the decade would have been extremely expensive, and then switching to LTE a few years later again. They made the good business decision to keep existing CDMA infrastructure, halt spending money to further evolve the technology and are instead focusing on phasing out CDMA completely withing 3 years time.
It has nothing to do with technical advancement or retardation and everything to do with the nature of telecom history in the country. Our CDMA carriers simply made a business decision to stay CDMA, while not investing billions further developing it (towards rev. b then c), or billions switching to GSM only to once again switch to LTE fully. And in the meantime....no one really cares. It works fine and will continue to work fine until it's killed off in a few years. The process has already begun. Phone manufacturers have been making both GSM and CDMA versions of the same phone for years and years and years. Apple making a CDMA iPhone is not some huge burden, every other phone maker has done so, and they do so because they make money selling those versions to CDMA customers.
The great advantage of a single standard works fantastic in Europe where travel between small countries is fairly common, or choice of carriers all using the same tech. In the US you have 2 GSM providers, that's it. The benefit of portability is very very small: 2 carriers; and the benefit of international use is absolutely true, but unless you are an international jet setter in which case you would make up about .05% of the population, it's not important. If our GSM carriers had great and consistent coverage, their superior speeds would be a great advantage, unfortunately they don't have it. And again, this will all be moot in a few years. They are all, along with the whole world moving to LTE, and we will finally have the advantage of choice and portability among carriers using the same phones we already have.