Indeed, "LED" doesn't necessarily imply "local dimming". That's a feature that would be explicitly called out.

Now, there are other really important things they *should* talk about but don't. For example, not all LEDs are made equally. They come in very different "bins" of brightness per watt, as well as bins of color temperature. Blue-ish LEDs are brighter and cheaper than yellow-ish. Depending on what LED bins the TV manufacturer selects, you'll have differences in color response accuracy and gamut.

And then there's my favorite pet peeve: matte vs. glossy screens. Glossy screens seem to get better "contrast ratio" specs and they do indeed look better if you're in a pitch-black room. But otherwise, you see reflections of the room in the screen.

Lastly, there's the quality of the digital section. There are all sorts of tricks the manufacturers play with noise reduction, deinterlacing, interpolating higher frame rates, etc. The high-dollar home theater types use external boxes for all that and are primarily interested in screens that display their input accurately. It can be quite striking the differences between different digital decoders. I was once at a store (Magnolia HiFi in Palo Alto, ~2007) that had a Sony and Samsung, side by side, where the panels came off the same assembly line. They appeared to be properly calibrated. The colors were identical, but the Sony destroyed the Samsung when things got busy on screen and MPEG devolved into a blocky mess. The Samsung showed blocky yuck, while the Sony seemed much better.