Yeah, well, one of the big functions of publishers is retail distribution and these local publishers are basically just that, distributors, since all the other functions are covered by the one publisher that financed the game and probably oversaw its production.

But I think that you can't define the term "publisher" with one synonym. Publishers usually are investors, usually they are the "owners", usually they are the distributors and often they also fulfill other funcitions such as (partially) production, quality assurance and of course marketing. Every publisher has to be able to cover all these aspects but the relationships between publishers and developers vary a lot. Crytek's relationship to EA is for example a totally different one than Maxis' (which is only an EA label by now anyway) - Crytek seems to retain a lot of rights to its works and boasts with being independent whereas many other devs basically are a part of EA.

It's quite clear what a publisher does and that it is more than the term "publisher" implies but it's wrong to assume that each publisher does the same thing in each case - and I don't think that there's a single analogy to other industries that properly reflects the definition of "publisher" as we know it from the game industry.