can...

Err. Actually I can confirm that you CAN buy the iphone WITHOUT contract from US, I've colleagues that just did that for the 1st gen iphone last year. They were on a biz trip to the US back then.

All they did is walk into the apple store and buy it "as a gift" for someone, meaning, they declined the contract, hence they only paid  the price for the phone, not the contract. If you don't buy the contract, the iphone will be unactivated.

So, YES, you CAN buy it at US$199 without any contract. But how you activate it and use it with Malaysia's GSM carriers is up to you. I think we should start a thread on how to do that here