Whether you are aware or not Google changed the way they rank sites in Google.co.uk serps. The .co.uk sites used to have a huge preference there but now you can relatevely easily get your .com, .net or whatever site on the first page of the British SERPs, check out this article and comments to it for details and don't forget to sphinn US Websites break into the UK SERPs It would be really interesting to learn what you think about it.
As most of the people in the comments have said - it misses the point by several thousand miles. As do you. Have you actually read the article? or the comments. This is not about how to get a .com site into .co.uk results, it's about the irrelevance of a lot of the results over the past 3 or so months. I'll refer you also to a discussion on the youtube channel where Matt Cutt's video is - searchers in Gt Britain looking for things associated with Manchester are being served results from Manchester in New Hampshire USA - who benefits from that? Not the New Hampshire sites, and not people trying to find shops or services in the North of England who probably didn't know there was another Manchester
Well it did miss the point on the relevancy of the results and the author has admitted it in the comments. But still the change means you can rank well in Google.co.uk with a .com, .au or perhaps any other website if you do a bit of geo-targeted SEO. I understand that the British site owners are concerned about irrelevant sites outranking theirs, but for the rest of the world it's more about the fact that ranking high in Google UK is much easier now.