Did you read the article?
At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone, and the payment will be securely completed using NFC technology.
This will accept contactless cards, Google Pay, etc. as well.
What makes you think it only supports payment from Apple devices? The press release is pretty clear:
At checkout, the merchant will simply prompt the customer to hold their iPhone or Apple Watch to pay with Apple Pay, their contactless credit or debit card, or other digital wallet near the merchant’s iPhone
It's not only Apple Pay:
> US merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay _and other contactless payments_
Imagine if there was a regulation that required interoperability. Or if the banks were forced to allow (authenticated) payments between systems without transaction fees.
We're 20 years overdue for this.
https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
Note: I worked on this
I don't really understand why a merchant would use this feature.
If you already use a PoS, why would you replace it with another one that only supports customers who own an Apple device?
If you accepted only cash, maybe it's a small improvement because you can use your existing iPhone if you had one to accept cashless payments from Apple customers...
Does Tap to Pay only make sense in the second case or am I missing something?