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The comment about lack of connectivity in the London Underground is a good one, but couldn't you just download a token in advance?  Not ideal, but not a showstopper either.  And most other places, it's not an issue.

As for the security point, I don't get that at all.  How can a one-use token lead to any sort of bank breach?  It's actually safer than passing a real card number through a terminal.

With regard to the inability of banks and carriers to come together on mobile payments, my hope is that ideas like this will persuade the carriers that they cannot control the handset, and therefore must negotiate with the banks if they don't want to be irrelevant.

Chris,

The main difference between Macy's and iTunes that I can see is that Macy's owns its merchandise, whereas iTunes does not. When you buy a magazine on iNewsstand, Apple doesn't send you a PDF; instead, it notifies the magazine publisher that you have bought an issue, and the publisher unlocks it within the publisher's own app. This led to problems last year when someone figured out how to spoof Apple's authentication server. People were able to use the exploit to send fake certificates to app developers, allowing them to unlock content or in-game currency without paying for it.  This is closer to cloning a credit card than it is to shoplifting clothing, which is why I think iTunes is closer to a payment scheme than it is to a store.

Chris,

iTunes is a wallet in the sense that it can be used to buy goods and services from a variety of merchants.  The fact that these merchants all traffic in digital goods in the Apple ecosystem is the only difference.  iTunes is not just a store, in that you can make in-app purchases without ever going into the desktop iTunes application; for example, subscribing to a magazine through iNewsstand.  Originally, of course, iTunes was a digital music store, hence the name; however, over the years it has become much more than that.  Which is why last year, before it became clear that the iPhone 5 would not have NFC, many people speculated that Apple would be a leader in the wallet space.  If you look at the amount of money being spent on apps, in-app purchases, and digital content (music, movies, magazines, comics, TV, etc.), it is much greater than anything we see in the physical realm.  And that's not even counting other mobile wallets like Google Play, XBox points, and Facebook credits (remember when Facebook credits were going to take over the world?).

I hope that clarifies my point of view.