I appreciate your opinion, but there are two problems I see here.
1) Bad analogy (the freezer would have to work somewhere to be comparable to the iPad)
2) Free markets ensure that there will be repercussions. You're not required to buy it. For this reason, I find the government regulations ridiculous in Europe.
Yeah, the analogy was quite bad, but I was at work and didn't have much time.

I guess it really is a culture and background thing how you see government involvement.
My problem is just that there is no way what so ever to get 4G to work in Europe with the current product due to the difference in frequencies. But other products work with 4G. Now if there was a single phone company that offered a 4G network for the iPad (with the US frequencies here), the situation would be different, but there just isn't.
So offering 4G with the current product is just wrong. The frequencies are being used for some time for 4G, it's not like they changed them yesterday.
Apple could have adopted the right ones to offer a real 4G, but I can see why they didn't. But they can't offer it as a 4G as it just isn't a 4G.
But that's something a lawyer might have to decide. Does having a 4G chip for the sake of having it, make the product a 4G? Or does it have to work as a 4G.
By the by, I could also see an American suing over that for gazillions of dollars due to vast personal problems suffered by the product not working as advertised. You couldn't do that in Europe.
It really is a culture thing (and that's not saying it's bad, it's just different .-)