So an entire country of 1.3B people, with 8 factories under construction and a dozen or so more announced are going to outproduce one US factory. Okay, why is that news?

Seriously Bloomberg - this is what Elon has been saying publicly since day 1, the entire Tesla vision was built on batteries getting cheaper and more available.

The Gigfactory is important to Tesla not merely because of it's scale, but for the advantages of vertical integration for QC, capacity planning, supply chain stability, etc. The same reason auto manufacturers had their own steel plants back in the early days.