It's my experience that European releases get "Special Editions" because that's the only way they GET games otherwise (slow or non-existent releases are common with them for some reason... game companies seem to ignore Europe exists).
Your logic is confusing. Special Editions are more common elsewhere tbh.
History lesson time:
Prior to the PS3 generation, the PAL territories (that's Europe and Australia) had to wait longer for games because NTSC (Japan and NA) had to be converted to PAL. It's a 50Hz vs. 60Hz thing (or 625 vs. 525 lines thing, as is more accurate). It's to do with the way the TV set is optimised. They started introducing 60Hz options in games for the Dreamcast, but all games had to be ported to 50 to run on older TV's here in the EU.
But that's not all. It's the languages that really fucked it. Remember that to release a game in Europe, and to sell, the language has to be converted to Spanish, German, French, and whatever other of the hundreds they feel like converting to (there's a polish version of FFVIII for PC for example). That's another reason we wait longer.
Into the bargain they fucked us on price. When converted, games here cost literally twice or at least 175% as much as they did in the US, before people had the internet and could publicly moan about it. It's called "rip-ff Britain", there's an article about it on Wikipedia. It still happens, but to a lesser extent.
Anyway the reason we don't need to wait anymore is because TV's now function in the same way pretty much worldwide (HDTV's). So that's the reason. We missed out on some games sure (mislabelled American FFII and III for example) but on the whole we got most games.
As for special editions, it fluctuates between being the same as, better, or worse than North America, but it depends on the game. Sonic Generations got a UK exclusive collector's edition, but that's because the game sold better here than in any other country in the world, and this is also the country that put Sega ahead of Nintendo in terms of console sales back in the day (likely because Nintendo used to fuck us by not releasing games where Sega found a way). FF games it seems to depend on what side of the bed Square Enix woke up on. The FFXIII-2 Crystal Edition was EU exclusive and I know that had a shitload more stuff in it than the one available in North America, but the Kingdom Hearts re-releases have had better special editions in North America. Type-0's Collector's Edition was the same for both regions.
So back to the point: it's really really weird that VIII got such an edition exclusively in the EU. My guess is that it exists because FFVII sold so well here. Squaresoft (oh how we miss you) took a chance by releasing it - not expecting to do so well maybe - and it had comparatively astronomical sales. So they knew the demand would be there for VIII and put that collector's edition out there. That's the only explanation I can think of.
EDIT: I've just remembered Uncharted 3 had the Explorer Edition which was EU exclusive containing a bunch more stuff than the "best" one available in America, so there's another weird one.
