You flatter me Fin. I'm not widely known to the rich and famous to the point that they would try to get as far as possible from me. However your kind words give me comfort.
I think the distinction between orbital and sub orbital flights would be lost on whoever wrote that article.
It depends on the type of orbit you want, the ISS has a very high orbital inclination (it travels a long way north and south as it orbits the planet) due in part to the fact that the soyuz capsules are launched from Baikonur in Kazhakstan (46 degrees north). the Soyuz holds the record for the longest service as a spacecraft so there must be some advantages to Baikonur being so far from the equator.
Of course you can launch into some kind of orbit from anywhere on earth. But if you want to be able to get to geostationary (as any commercial launch site wanting to attract customers would need to), you can obviously get more mass to GEO for less fuel from an equatorial launch pad than you can from a location further North or South. Northern Queensland, French Guiana, or the Pacific Ocean south of Hawaii might be good spots, for example; Scotland - not so much.
It's not that Baikonur has advantages, it's just that the Soviet Union was a northern country and had no access to any suitable locations nearer the equator when they started building a space complex. Nowadays some Russian-made rockets are very sensibly shipped to Kourou, French Guiana so they can be launched near the equator.
