In reply to Philip Cohen.

What is is about payments that encourages verbosity? Thoughtful if unfocused post. You know your payments. But not Apple. They make money from selling hardware, and hardware that integrates well with what users do and want to do. So of corse they are not trying to disrupt V, MC, et al. They want to make the devices one uses for commerce an Apple device.

And that's where Apple have a huge advantage over most everyone else in the payments/mobile commerce space, who's models depend on collecting and monetizing data or scrabbling for a bit of the merchant discount pie.