I've always thought it just means the phone works on 6 continents. However I would actually bet also LTE will technically work on 6 continents. Of course limited 2.6 GHz coverage in Canada might not be much use to Americans, but that's a different story...

Lack of LTE functionality at launch is regrettable, but at least it's in the hardware. The last new phones I bought were Nokia E71 and ZTE Blade, and at the time of purchase HSUPA was promised for both of them (for E71 also other features) yet there was no hardware support and never will be.