I'm not sure about the money argument still though -- a joke? How much more money do you think your avg dev is getting paid in the US vs what we get here in Europe? A regular employee/salaried dev is looking at at least 90k euro/year in nl, which is a very very comfortable living before bonus/benefits and NL also has the 13'th month thing which allows for easy laptop buying every year... Senior/Lead folks are looking at more plus options and whatever..
It's obviously a hard thing to measure, but I think the quality of life argument for your typical european is somewhat higher than your generic american worker (25 days holiday, employee-biased employment laws, various lifestyle protections (e.g in holland if you're a fully 'paid up' taxpayer and you lose your job then the govt will give you some 75% of your last salary while you find another role)).
I guess there's no way to really compare all these things, there are too many other factors -- I'm really curious on how much more money you're talking about here though...
It might be easier in hardware, I don't know how well ASML pays.
According Payscale, the average salary for a developer in Netherlands is 41k Euro/Year (http://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...), and in Amsterdam, the capital, 53k (http://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Senior_Software_Engi...).
In Copenhagen and Barcelona (the two Euro cities where I have worked) 90k is totally off the market.