EU folks, note the warnings threaded throughout this post: this is not currently any sort of panacea against US or AU data hosting risks, but it will make your data noticeably closer to home. Fastmail (Australia) merged with Pobox (Philadelphia) resulting in a complex tri-national law/risk surface when the EU is involved, so go in eyes wide open having read this in full. That everyone will overinterpret “EU data region” to mean “for privacy” here until reading the article is completely understandable; I empathize, having done the same.
I think it's not unreasonable to see this as a first, positive, step.
It's certainly giving them some benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that, say, the EU server and the US backup will in some time be an EU server and an EU backup.
Indeed; see also the top thread discussing that, as I don’t have anything to add to the ground already covered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223931