VERY odd. Here’s one of the topics about this from a year ago. The whole thing made zero sense.
Also I sure they weren’t region locked since I ordered one of the copies off the German amazon.de site with my amazon.com ID and used the install key. you can also change the default language in the game settings.
edit: I guess this is why they passed out 500 keys to the big patch beta testers since I suspect the whole mess involved Deep Silvers distribution. They could sell the copies with the swords, but they could pass out some keys.