It wasn't, at least for me. I got it running but don't really know what was the exact reason for failing before.

First, I erased & re-created the microSD's partition layout (ext4, swap, swap) with GParted (used Disks or sth like that earlier).

At booting Kali, I only chose the en_US.UTF-8 locale and set C.UTF-8 as default. Region and TZ as before. And hohum, the GUI started!
Afterwards, I ran dpkg-reconfigure locales as root and tested creating & setting the default locale to something else and after reboot it also worked. Finally, I set the default to en_US.UTF-8.

Beyond re-creating the uSD layout and using different locales nothing else changed for me, didn't even re-download the kali image.

(Later on, I've had some small problems to overcome like adding the user to the netdev group to get wicd running and NetworkManager still isn't running as user, only when logged in as root, but these are an another matter)

I also booted to Maemo for a while to see that FlopSwap works and then booted back to Kali so my guess is the 3 partitions shouldn't be a problem.

TL;DR: The uploaded image is probably fine. Try with a re-created partitioning or another uSD card. If all else fails, try different default locales.
EDIT: I only now noticed that Kabouik had already tried different locales without success, so maybe the locales can be ruled out.