I see that a lot of companies are sending users to a new page to select a different language/country. Once on the page, it is generally just a huge list of countries sorted by continent. Or, users are prompted to select a continent and it filters down from there. This seems to be done by the majority of big companies (see Apple or Nike for examples.)
What is the advantage of that instead of using some type of accordion on the page? Such as how its done at http://us.pg.com/ or http://www.wacom.com/ or youtube (which does the same but in the footer.)
It seems like the interaction cost is significantly less using an accordion or dropdown that doesn't have to change pages and load. Am I missing something?