yep, that's great news and all but wake me up when this becomes available in Canada. might give me a reason to upgrade from my 5S. and it's really pretty ironic that the roll-out of Apple Pay starts in USA which has the least level of NFC adoption among developed countries. Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, Korea all have quite high NFC adoption levels by merchants already. So it would have been much easier for Apple to gain acceptance for Apple pay in any of these markets than in US. but of course that's not going to happen...
The US lacks a secure payment system. EMV has a low level of acceptance here (just used my chipped card at a place today that has PIN pads with disabled EMV readers, becoming a common occurrence
In other countries, if you don't have an NFC, you at least have EMV. In the US, if you don't have NFC, you have magstripe. There's a reason why all these data breaches are happening at American retailers.