The user you're responding to probably doesn't really understand how kubernetes works, and the trade-offs that the etcd has taken to allow in order to be "distributed".

But you're right. You launch node pretty much anywhere, as long as you have network connectivity (and you don't even need full network connectivity, a couple of tcp ports open are enough).

It's not really recommended (due to latency), but you can also run the control-plane across different regions.

I've contributed to Kubernetes core and worked for its creators for some time. I really love how crappy the k8s die hards treat people.

It's not really built to be globally scalable, Mesos was built to be globally scalable. I don't know of any major hosted kubernetes provider that does this.