That's a loaded question. Yes, they look comparable. Don't worry about exchange rates because it will average out usually for ETF's. If anything American dollars will appreciate with rising interest rates so it would be marginally better to buy in US now. Not sure what you mean with regards to tax. My (very) humble opinion if you are asking what I think about the ETF's in general is that I do not like Emerging Markets ETFs much as there are very big losers amongst the winners. The 5 year return on the fund is not good. Same for total market. The problem is when you cast such a big net, when times are bad, it'll be really bad. VEU almost lost half it's value two years ago! The rosy one year curve is sort of misleading because the big holdings in those funds just had an incredible expansion bull year. It might be better to just choose two or three of the stocks and invest only in those.

The cost of fees is just a compounded interest problem. If you have 10000 and pay 1% fee then first year you pay 100. Then let's say you had a 10% return so on the second year your fund stands at 10900. 1% of that again is $109. So on and so forth. The amount charged keeps going up because your fund grows. So a fee charged is ideally as low as possible. ETF fees are really just convenience fees. There's literally nothing stopping you from copying an ETF top ten holdings except for brokerage fees. ETF are usually passively managed and the holdings are rotated in or out based on a predecided algorithim and set of criteria which you can find in the fund's prospectus.

Hope this helps.