What are you talking about? Passbook was never a payment system, it just had gift cards. Passbook isn't a payment system NOW. Apple Pay is, Passbook is just the app that shows users their credit cards.
Right, Passbook was Apple's first play at mobile payments. They were trying to build an app ecosystem that used credits to to make mobile payments. It was Apple's response to NFC which wasn't very good.
The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC. Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful.
June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.