Considering the title and the entire article is in the future tense I'm going out on a limb here and stating that Apple has not yet pulled those products from the UK market.
If you're talking about FaceTime and iMessage... They might technically not cost any money, but if I wanted to use them I'd first have to pay for an overpriced badly designed phone, which means they're debatably free. They're used to enrich the iPhone- just look at the whole blue/green text bubble thing. 'If you don't also have an iPhone you get treated differently' hardly sounds like something a totally 'free' software would include. It just feeds into their 'exclusivity' bubble.