Absolutely. I live in New Zealand, and would be happy to hire anyone in my country (it's not a huge place). But because "We're assuming you're in Christchurch, Canterbury.", which is about 5 hours drive from here (and a 3 hour ferry trip), and because I can't change it to just "New Zealand", the entire service is pretty much not usable.

Other than that I really like the simplicity. I don't like services like elance that make me perform the whole transaction through their website. I would prefer a simple classified-like solution like this appears to be.

I agree. I do like that it defaults to local people and supporting local freelancers is fantastic, but when a local search doesn't return what I need it would be nicer to expand to "anywhere." I don't particularly prefer local over remote for my work or for those I'm working with. And hey - more eyeballs = more money! So says @garyvee at least! ;)