They will accept publishers from outside the US - I believe that you need a US bank account to get paid at present. Could be wrong on that though.
I just got accepted and added the code to one portion of my site (it will never show at the same time as the google ads on other pages). No ads are appearing but on the bright side, it's completely blank, haha. Nobody clicks from my forums anyway, I just want to see how the targetting is (and i'm a few dollars away from $100 from google) before I switch completely...but I'm going to try it for a month. I'm getting 8-10 cents a click on google, way down from a year ago it was about 25.