Guys, I'm no expert, but I'm fairly positive that there are several tariffs and taxes put upon Adobe, by both the US and the other governments, that for Adobe to charge a higher amount for foreign distribution. Yes, it sucks, but they always said the two things you will always contend with are death and taxes.
@Bjorn -
Have you missed the wealth of press over this release? CF9 brings many new features to the table, making it a significant upgrade that is well worth the licensing. A few items:
Built in Hibernate ORM support
MS Office/OpenOffice document manipulation
Complete parity in cfscript
Cloud licensing
Improved EULA, w/ changes for dev/testing/staging environments
That's just a few items, there are many more. I'm sure you can find a blog post somewhere from one of the ug tour stops that outline the new features in greater depth.