tedster - 11:49 pm on Oct 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

"Subdirectories with gTLDs"

I'm not 100% clear on what that means. Do you mean that each country's content gets it's own domain name, such as example.es. example.co.uk and so on? If so, then they are no longer subdirectories. And yes, that's still one of the best ways to serve "near duplicate" content to different geographies.

Please let me know if I misunderstood your question.