I used Orange extensively on my iPhone on a trip to France. It is an outstanding service, with very impressive EDGE speeds.

Possibly Apple hadn't made an announcement because Visual Voicemail isn't in place yet.

If no-one had noticed, Apple is signed with the incumbant national operator for each country.
Orange aka France Telecom, O2 aka BT, T-Mobile = Deutsche Telecom - If i were to guess, for Netherlands it will be KPN, Italy would be TIM and Spain Telefonica, Belgacom for Belgium.

For obvious reasons to be honest - if you are in bed with the national operator, you can undercut the competition quite dramatically.

I would imagine that once this is known Vodafone's share price is going to plummet

Just my 2 Cents of course.

If you visit http://www.orange.fr/ you will see it is suffering from portalitis (a disease affecting sites where everything is there, including some else's kitchen sink, except what you wanted from it).

If you look it is announced there, but it is lost in the news section: announcement

by the way - from the article posted, the release date is November 9th - what a surprise that is?

Apple is able to get the iPhone out in Europe, but Canada's duopoly (more correctly, monopoly for the type of network controlled by Rogers) is showing the world what an embarrassment mobile telecommunications are in the Great White North.