Wow. In the UK, almost any DVD player by any manufacturer can be made multi-region, and most decent stores, online or highstreet, will sell you a chipped or otherwise modified version of pretty much any DVD player, with a full warranty.

I guess this is different in the US, as no-one in the mighty US of A would want to play inferior foreign DVDs

Might be worth finding a common US DVD player model from Sony or similar and see if there is any info on the 'net on whether it can be made multi-region. It might just be the case that mods aren't made such a big thing of over there.