As stated elsewhere, remember that the Race to Infinity was a BT Retail activity, the deployment to 41 market towns was an Openreach announcement. It would be very odd if the results of the Retail competition influenced the total FTTC/P deployment - I'm sure other service providers would have concerns!
All the many comments posted here and against the news item show is that you can't please all of the people all of the time, its a sort of reverse NIMBYism. Of course it IS in my backyard so I'm happy anyway.
I presume, if someone could be bothered to look at this, that the 41 towns would have some degree of commonality. No idea what this would be - number of lines, population, density, geographc spread? Or perhaps a combination of these. This may help to explain why these and not some other, apparently more obvious, locations have been included?