That said, this meant that slow disk transfer was not a handicap for C64 in the UK. Since tape was the medium of choice for ZX Spectrum and other rivals, C64 was on a level playing field. If anything C64 still had the advantage, because the Commodore Datasette is a digital format and very reliable, while Spectrum and US rivals like Apple and TRS-80 use analog formats and are incredibly unreliable that made people cry, groan, moan, and curse. Apple II's tape storage is also analog, but Disk II caused the Apple market to very soon move to disk-only (and Disk II is perhaps the greatest of Woz's many late-1970s engineering triumphs) so it didn't matter.
Three things I am unclear on:
* The extent of the above-mentioned abridgement process. My understanding is that both cosmetic things like loading screens, and sometimes entire portions like (say) a couple of the sports in the Epyx Games series, were removed. I don't know if there is a compendium of the abridgements; I don't see the information at Lemon64, but perhaps I missed it.
* Why software crackers had to crack cassette games in the first place, given that they can be duplicated with any dual-bay tape deck. Was there a reason other than to say they could do it (see next point), and perhaps to allow for cheating?
* The extent of crack intros for cassette games. In the US, crackers (then and now) put small animations before loading to announce themselves send greetings to friends and rivals. I'm sure this happened in the UK but the medium no doubt restricted the intros' size.