Eh, I think there are a couple of things at work here.
First, I'm still not convinced there's a really compelling advantage to contactless payments from a convenience perspective. I still have to pull a physical token out of my pocket, and given I only use a couple of cards regularly, I don't really care if that token is a card or a phone.
Next, when you start talking anti-fraud, I think there's a reason that the push for that had to come from the payment processors.
From a consumer perspective, there's absolutely no good reason to care. Credit card fraud liability is one area where the US has incredibly strong consumer protection laws. If my credit card information gets stolen ala the Target breach, I'm not legally liable for any charges resulting from it. The most painful thing I have to worry about is disputing the charge and getting a new card issue. That's not a big enough deal to generate consumer demand for more secure payments.
Merchants have a bit more reason to care since they're usually the ones that get stuck with fraudulent charges, but it becomes a matter of whether occasional fraud is more expensive for them than upgrading all their POS equipment. The answer from Wal-Mart and Best Buy appears to be "no," and I know it's a pretty common sentiment among small business owners who often hate any spending associated their merchant accounts.
So that really leaves the processors as the ones who stand the most to gain from this. I don't see why it's surprising that the push had to come from the supply side as a result.
My phone is going to be a lot quicker to grab than my credit card, and this way it has better security.
As much as you say consumers don't care about security I still think some people will use this where they wouldn't use plain paywave because it's more secure.
Google's "solution" to this is Google Wallet Card, which is a physical MasterCard Debit Card. How popular this is I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if people who willingly hand over their transaction history to Google would also think its rational to use a google supplied card instead of their own card sitting right next to it in their wallet.
However, it's also not quite the wild-west of implementations that you imagine.
All the major credit card systems for contactless payments, are an implementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_14443 - of which NFC is also a compatible implementation.
Australia (and I suspect Europe) has had Visa PayWave/MC PayPass for a number of years - PayWave/PayPass POS terminals are very common in shops.
That the POS systems are not common in the US right now is no different to GSM not being common in the US when the iPhone was launched. America just seems to be particularly bad at implementing broad community affecting changes - and extremely bad at anything to do with banks it seems - like this, until they're dragged kicking and screaming into it.
I suspect that once Apple starts organising the B2B arrangements (i.e. dealing with banks) the rollout of ApplePay in the rest of the world - particularly "1st world" countries - will be phenomenally quick compared to in the US.