Maybe I'm just showing my age here, but if it were a hardware problem, it seems weird that the US would still have the launch woes Europe had over ten years ago.
So unless I'm going to a big retailer (rare) or the stores directly around work/home, the interaction is usually complicated and annoying for human factors layered on top of the complicated, annoying, and insecure chip+sig protocol the banks settled on because chip+pin was too annoying.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Ha. That doesn't surprise me at all - "It's too hard or expensive for the US to change compared to other nations" is not an uncommon argument for opponents of change.
It used to drive me insane when I first moved here now but is now one of the quirks I love about the US - people aren't Luddites they just really value a national sense of individualism and urge to seek their own solutions!
The US banks have been talking about "smart cards" and updating payment tech for 25 years, but from what I see they've only been talking...
I don't know about the EU, but US stores did this too. It has nothing to do with chip transactions being slow though. My chip card will not work when swiped at a chip-enabled PoS terminal. The issue, in the US at least, is that stores updated the physical terminal before (sometimes long before) enabling chip transactions at the processor level.