Just because you can provision Felica cards outside of Japan doesn't mean that you can actually use them. It's not really global support if you can add Suica in the US and then not use it. More likely is that Felica Networks agreed with this logic and Apple is only paying the license fee for JP devices, or has some side deal about not delineating between regions. If Apple didn't support Felica, it would just move more users in Japan onto physical cards or Android.

iPhone just wasn't going to exit the curious gadget status and become a first class citizen in the Japanese phone market without it. Same for emoji support and flick inputs and lots of those little things.

They were never forced to compete in the sense that no one is forced to be first class citizen anywhere. Apple just wanted to be by its own free will. That's technically correct.