I think UK was also the last in Europe to use chips on the cards, which, as far as I know, are the French invention. I remember using their specialized cards with chips there twenty years ago only to make some phone calls.
By the way a lot of elementary security issues with cards are there because all the mechanisms still have to allow Americans to use their magnetic stripes, allowing simple tricks with them that would otherwise not be possible. On another side, chips are no silver bullet when it comes to the security. There are a lot of possible attacks, just some specific set of them would be excluded by only having chips. So no matter how it's popular among the geeks, the real-life solutions to real life problems are not purely technological and probably will never be.
Still, as I live in Europe, I'd personally like to have the cards without the magnetic strip.
By the way a lot of elementary security issues with cards are there because all the mechanisms still have to allow Americans to use their magnetic stripes, allowing simple tricks with them that would otherwise not be possible. On another side, chips are no silver bullet when it comes to the security. There are a lot of possible attacks, just some specific set of them would be excluded by only having chips. So no matter how it's popular among the geeks, the real-life solutions to real life problems are not purely technological and probably will never be.
Still, as I live in Europe, I'd personally like to have the cards without the magnetic strip.