There are a few problems with that point in the US.

One problem is that in the US, many city centers have grown up with effectively no rail at all -- the cities were built well into the auto age. Even cities that had extensive rail have often ripped it out and torn down the central stations. While train stations (and associated infrastructure like parking lots) and rail lines take up much less space than airports, it can still be tough to knock down what already exists in a city center to make room for rail infrastructure. European cities generally had the land already devoted to rail and stations, even if the facilities had to be upgraded for high speed.

More seriously, many US cities don't really have a center. They've already grown in a sprawling pattern with major employment centers spread out with no major concentration, and in some cases actively avoiding the "center" and instead strung out along suburban freeways.

That's even the case for an old city like Boston; the IT firms are all 20 miles out on a ring road (Route 128) and mostly reachable only by car. Now, Boston's airport is also downtown with terrible access, so you're no worse off taking a train. But if like most cities Boston had a suburban airport that'd probably be better than train. Downtown is good you're visiting financial firms or the universities though, but again, that's as European as it gets in the US.

Go to a cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Denver, and ending up at the center is at best only slightly more useful than being parachuted in at random, and in some cases is actually a minus.