Just for clarification: they are required to refund customers in some jurisdictions (apparently Australia was the reason, indeed), so they might have decided to do this for everybody
a) out of the kindness of their heart (i.e. good public image), or
b) just not to deal with complexity of introducing different refund schemas per region.
c) to preempt additional regulation in more jurisdictions
Steams refund policies are still fairly weak IMO. For many games, two hours doesn't really tell you much about the quality of the game and Steam also knows that many users will not get around to even trying games they pick up within the two weeks that they grant refunds for.
Imagine you went to a physical store and bought something that turned out to be broken after a couple hours of use and the Store just said too bad. Absolutely unacceptable there but Steam reserves the right to and does often refuse refunds that are not within their stated limits.
You also don't have as much leverage with Steam as you do with some random store. If a merchant fucks you over you are supposed to be able to reverse the transaction but with Steam trying that with even one game will get you banned from the store completely - and with Steam being a not-quite monopoly that means many games will literally be unavailable to you.
AFAIK you also still cant refund Steam wallet "cash" into real money so if you bought a Steam wallet card in order to buy a Game and then want to refund that game you can effectively only exchange it for other Steam products which is not a real refund.
IMO Steam gets a lot of undue credit just for not being quite as terrible as the competition.
