ThreeGreen, another aspect that makes fractional ownership attractive in the US is the general congestion, inefficiency, and shabbiness of most major airports in the US. The pain and time of domestic travel in the US makes the bizjet system seem much nicer in comparison - in Australia the RPT does a much better job.
If we just focus big city pairs like NY/Chicago or NY/LA and compare this to Sydney/Melbourne or Sydney/Perth:
Sydney - airport close to the city, large, clean and efficient.
New York - Newark and JFK are far from the city with horrible traffic in between. LaGuardia is a dump and highly congested. Cabs are dirty and unsafe. (One option for this demographic, though is connecting helicopter flights to downtown).
LA and Chicago also have highly congested, generally shappy airports - weather delays are extremely frequent in Chicago, and in LAX you may have to wait an hour for your gate if things aren't running smoothly. And LAX isn't near where you want to be most of the time - as someone else pointed out the LA metro is huge.
On the AU side, Melbourne airport is a little further and not quite as nice and new-looking as Sydney, but still quite efficient by US standards. Perth is overloaded but still friendly and the airport is close to the city.
In all US airports you must arrive 1.5 to 2 hours prior to departure to clear security. Washington-Dulles airport for example has security lines that are literally a half-mile long. Elite status helps a bit - priority lines - but not everyone who flies in bizjets is really that frequent a traveler. The US TSA is a joke. In comparison, I've never waited more than 10 minutes in security lines in Australia and that was at the Sydney international terminal - at domestic terminals the wait seems more like 60-90 seconds average. I've arrived at the airport as late as 15 minutes before departure (without bags) and been let on my flight. In the US you'd be lucky to get the next flight an hour later with that arrival time!
I once made it from my office in the Sydney CBD to the gate lounge, waiting for my flight, in 23 minutes. In New York, even for LaGuardia, you would be very happy with 1.5 hrs. Then your flight to Chicago could take 2-3 hrs despite being about the same distance as Sydney-Melbourne, due to congestion at both airports and airspaces.
By my reckoning, another interesting advantage of the Australian system is that because almost all business travel is on one carrier, there are so many flights that flexibility is easy. There are so many carriers with a piece of the NY-Chicago pie, for example, that flights are likely less than once per hour on any particular carrier, and the next one might be fully booked. That can't compare to QF's every-15-minute SYD-MEL service during peak periods.
So by my book Australia should be proud of its RPT system, but that will make it that much harder for bizjets to be so successful.
--JP (Yank, migrated to Sydney)