The chip is being rolled out to keep up with VISA/Mastercard's deployment of chip. Note however that chip transactions are far slower than proximity or magstripe uses, making it completely redundant except for a malfunctioning magstripe reader.
It would have been as much software update to have implemented PIN and would've brought security to the level of ATM cards.
The generation and provisioning of card numbers is limited by other systems which includes fraud detection, account processing, auditing and other backend systems.
I wouldn't say "most places" -- after a recent trip to Europe (Ireland, England and France), the only place we couldn't use our "signature-only" card was a train ticket vending machine, every business we went to had a magnetic stripe reader and knew they had to use it when the card had no chip. (my wife's no-foreign-transaction-fee card had no chip, so we tried to use that one as much as possible)
In every case were I used a USA chip card (with no PIN), the card reader prompted for a signature, so it was no problem.
Though I really don't understand why USA issuers and merchants went with a chip-only system, seems like it would have been trivial to allow PIN too.
Though even Chip and PIN only fights a small portion of the fraud - every time I've experienced credit card fraud, it's been with internet purchases. Amex used to let me generate a temporary card number for each merchant, I used that all the time, but they dropped the service for some reason.
how is it slower than swiping the magstripe and signing a receipt? chip and pin has been standard in the EU for a while now and it is very fast, faster than magstripe swipe and sign but nit as fast as contactless.
This card also had the embedded chip, so that may be why it had the new number.