I can't speak for absolutely all American dialect areas, but I'd definitely never heard that expression until my roomie used it (she was raised in NZ, moved to Australia, spent some time in London, and then came to the US for grad school).

I think most Americans would say 'X is different from Y' or even 'X is different than Y'. This second one is frowned upon by grammar sticklers but it's becoming extremely common in speech and even shows up in written language over here.

I love finding these points of difference among different kinds of English...