I've never understood the appeal of this. Why not just tape a debit card to the back of your phone? I've got a VISA with "Blink". It hasn't exactly revolutionized paying for things.
It's not really a technological advance for me to have to take my phone out to pay for something.
NFC is useful for more than just payments. Need to exchange contact info? Or files? Or URLs? NFC works excellently for that. I predict it will end up being pretty popular.
WiFi Direct or Bluetooth seem to work well for that. Or a camera and a QRCode. Or infrared was the cool way to do that back in the day; I remember that my Palm Pilot could do that. We have a billion ways to do these things that people don't seem to really need to do. I think it's just a gimmick.
None of those technologies worked very well though. WiFi direct and bluetooth have the problem of being too long range. How does the transmitter determine who the receiver is, for example? This is why they made "bump" apps, because it was a useful kludge to solve the hand-shake / setup problem. And IR never worked very well and was far from ubiquitous, and hasn't been present on modern smartphones regardless.
NFC's advantage is that it just plain works. We'll see if it catches on, but it does cover a set of use cases that is fairly meaningful and has yet to be served by a truly robust and seamless technology.
It's not really a technological advance for me to have to take my phone out to pay for something.