[cbhl]

One of the things I noticed about the chip and pin migration in Canada was that when merchants all upgraded their point-of-sale terminals to handle EMV, many new terminals also happened to handle contactless payments.

I've been on two internships in the valley, and despite the availability of Google Wallet, I couldn't find a merchant that would accept it (apart from McDonald's) because everyone was still using magstripe-only terminals. (There were even a few merchants at trade shows who were still using triplicate carbon-copy forms...!)

I think Coin is a product that makes sense for the US market right now as a transitionary product, and wouldn't be surprised if Google acquired them some time in the next year or so and rolled them into the Wallet product offering. When and if US merchants upgrade to chip-and-pin capable offerings, (almost) everyone who owns a Nexus device made in the last two or three years will be ready with unified wallet offerings that already exist.