Good observation... the only reason backrecord.com is still with godaddy is lack of time to make sure I have a process worked out to do it without any downtime. I actually transferred more than 20 domains because of SOPA and can assure you the others will be transferred at some point relatively soon. backrecord.net for instance is no longer with godaddy.
I don't have the time to look for it now, but I recall, somewhere in the myriad of recent HN comments on GoDaddy, there was at least one where the person stated that they switched with no downtime. If you find it, you could ask them if they did anything in particular to achieve that outcome.
Regardless, I think that, ultimately, when it comes to DotCOM, it does not matter which registrar you use, or where your business is located, because it seems as if the US will continue with, and expand upon, its various efforts at interfering with that TLD. I have a pressing need to register a bunch of domains, and it's obvious that I should use DotCOM (simply for the purpose of preventing those names from being taken by someone else in the most popular TLD), but I don't know to which TLD(s) my DotCOMs should point. I've investigated a bunch of them, and I'm leaning towards DotTEL, because it has a few nice features, particularly its uniqueness in that every webpage is generated dynamically from content stored in DNS. Of course, DotTEL can't replace most websites, but it could act as a gateway to your content.
