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.
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...
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!
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.