Excellent analysis. As you mentioned innovation in payments is always more difficult and takes way longer than anticipated. I believe this is actually the reason Apple Pay started with NFC.

Choosing NFC gives Apple a huge head start respective to consumer adoption. While NFC is not widely used, the past attempts to launch it have already educated consumers on how "tap and pay" works. Additionally, while NFC is only accepted at 2% of merchants, those 2% represent a number of highly frequented locations like McDonalds and Subway. Finally, by starting with NFC, Apple got all the major networks with their advertising budgets and their largest issuing customers to support their launch - something that would have been a lot less likely with an iBeacon only solution.

In the end, I believe Apple Pay will be an inflection point that changes the face of payments and creates a new set of "winners and losers" - just like the introduction of plastic cards did decades ago.