[SXX]

   > And iirc Apple managed to convince the banking sector that Apple Pay is equivalent to chip card security, so that they get better rates.

As far as I aware that's because Apple actually have hardware-backed implementation so tokens (or signatures or whatever, I honestly have no idea how they called for NFC payments) are generated on iPhone itself. Google on other side just keep few tokens on Android device, but they are actually pre-generated on Google servers.