Latest Android Update Introduces Ability To Change Locale

My G1 just updated to the new 1.1 firmware. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t seem to publish details on Android updates, but I noticed two major changes:

1. In “About phone” there is now a “System updates” tab which allows you to manually check for updates
2. Support for voice search (with and without geo-sensitivity)
3. The setting that only controlled text and writing options is now called “Locale & text” and allows you to set your phone to a different locale

The latter change was a much requested feature, however, it doesn’t seem to work properly with my phone. I use a German SIM card, but still, I cannot set the locale to something other than “English”. This is a bit frustrating, because e.g. phone numbers are formatted differently in Germany than they are in the U.S., so dialing numbers on my G1 feel a bit awkward. (On a side note, it is interesting to notice that the Browser application defaults to google.de on my phone, i.e. to the German version of Google search.)

Does anyone experience similar problems with not being able to change the locale? I suspect it may be related to the origin of my phone (I received it from Google rather than buying it in a local store).