The only reason I'd like to see it "succeed" is that whole tokenization thing that keeps all credit card data private. That's a huge advantage over anything else in my opinion, and if it succeeds, others like Google will have to replicate it.

I know Google wallet creates a virtual credit number, but that remains "permanent", so in terms of tracking, it's not that much different than using the real credit number. It protects you against theft, but not tracking.

Now that I know this kind of tokenization is possible (and more importantly acceptable by the financial industry) even if I'm not going to be in the Apple ecosystem, I'm not going to use anything else that doesn't use the same method.

What sort of tracking are you worried about?

If you're worried about merchant-level tracking, I think tokenization makes little or no difference. Quoting from the article:

"Tokenization is typically handled by the payment network, which (in some implementations) encrypts the credit card number right when you swipe it, sends it back for the token, and then provides that to the merchant to keep for things like refunds or customer tracking."

The only potential merchant-level tracking difficulty I can see is that tokens can be merchant-specific, which might make unified customer tracking more difficult after a merger. And even if financial institutions didn't provide services like post-merger token-matching (something I wouldn't bet on), plenty of merchants have quite a bit of experience using other signals to approximate that kind of matching.

Contactless EMV also doesn't send the name, making it much much much much harder for companies to try to guess who you are to add you to their mailing list (why do you think companies ask for your ZIP code so much? Name + ZIP uniquely identifies a lot of the population).

(Contactless MSD doesn't either - it normally sends something like "VALUED CUSTOMER" or "NOT AVAILABLE")