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I don't know that this is going to really end up meaning anything about our relationship with Great Britain, but there were other issues about the visit that weren't done at the typical level. Apparently, there's an expectation of a certain level of joint press conference that didn't happen either. If you look at the visit in it's totality, Obama didn't make as big a deal about Brown's visit as is typical.
I suspect that you don't get to be PM by being really thin skinned, but if you look at the discrepancy in the gift exchange and level of pomp, if I were a member of the British public, I might think Obama didn't act right.
How much does that matter? I don't know, but I know there were people at the time of the election for whom what the rest of the world thought about us mattered. Sure, they were concerned about more meaningful foreign policy issues than gift exchanges, but can you really afford to blow off symbolic interpersonal stuff? It ought to be a gimme.
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