Bankrate.com published an interesting article about the relatively slow pace of chip-based card adoption by consumers and merchants, despite the fraud liability shift that occured beginning October 1, 2015.
The same point-of-sale upgrades required for EMV may ultimately spell doom for the familiar plastic payment card. It will be a slow death (after all, there are plenty of paper checks still in use despite debit cards and electronic payments), but the same POS technology that supports EMV also allows wireless phones and other enabled devices to serve as access points for payment accounts and digital wallets, making payment cards redundant.
EMV also greatly lowers the barrier-to-entry for new players, who can enable new payment options and innovations at the point-of-sale much more cheaply and quickly than in the past. I doubt that most card issuers fully comprehend what a world without physical payment cards (and the associated branding challenges and expanded competitive landscape) would look like.