As an American I was interested enough to keep researching Airbus models on Wikipedia. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Airbus has manufacturing even in the U.S. for its airline production programs, and has even been expanding that production capacity.

I have flown on many intra-US flights on non-American planes (including Airbus, Bombardier and even Brazil's Embraer)... sometimes the market actually works!

I also read the NY Times article, and they covered quite in detail the successes and strengths of the A380 as espoused by the CEO of Emirates. Far from being a "hit piece" against the A380, the article appeared to me to be a simple-enough exposition of two major airline manufacturers taking different gambles about the future of aviation. Would this story only be accurate if it were published by Le Monde or Der Spiegel?

To return to your point, the whole point to Boeing's 787 development was to compete with "longer-range international" routes... at such a long range, in fact, that two cities could be directly connected instead of requiring the spoke-and-hub model that the A380 is optimized for. And in any event, U.S. carriers do indeed run long range international routes that would theoretically be up the A380's alley, but the problem is as you state: "you'd never fill THAT many seats" to make A380 profitable for U.S. airlines (as the NYT articles states, these airlines returned to profitability by reducing excess capacity).