I will soon turn 56.
IMHO you see more yammies in the US because they are easier to find.
You can start out with the lower priced PSR's at almost any Dept. store. (k-mart, sears, Best Buy) You can start out for a hundred bucks when you outgrow that machine you can spend a couple hundred more for an improvement. And you don't have to learn a whole new machine.
Most other brands the low end is 5 or 600 hundred dollars and then it upgrades to a couple thousand with not much in between.