Will skimmers be rendered obsolete by chip cards? It seems like this will all be over when the last magnetic strip reader is shut down. Although I've never seen a chip reader at a gas station, so it may be a while.
It is impossible (yet) to hack chip & pin. The problem is that even chip cards have a magstripe that can be skimmed. EMV[1] enabled fallback funtionality by default, which is the biggest issue imho. Basically, if your chip is broken, a terminal goes through fallback mechanism and uses magstripe instead. This way you can clone a card with "broken" chip and copied magstripe. Some banks allow to disable (opt-out) magstripe for chip cards, so unless you are in US, you should do that. I've seen some people intentionally scratched magstripe, but I'm not sure it's a very good idea.
Sure you could. But I'd like to have a backup options in case I end up in strange place that doesn't accept chip&pin or my chip is really broken while on travel. It could be opt-in, so in case I need magnet, I could call my bank and ask to enable it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV