Without disagreeing with your comment, I will add that Apple's "wait" had two other very important aspects. First is that it waited for EMV to do "tokenization", which is critically important to AP. The second - perhaps fortuitous and accidental - is that the change to chip cards (mandated by EMV) happens by next October. So most POS terminals will have to be upgraded or replaced by then, and the overwhelming scheme is to include NFC capability as part of that upgrade/replace scenario. Google didn't have that years ago when it rolled out its Wallet - there were some NFC-enabled stores but not that many. But with Apple making its move a year before the change deadline, it provided a lot of rationale for vendors of POS systems to push NFC as part of the replace/upgrade package, and for companies to buy it. They already had to upgrade/replace (with few exceptions) so adding the NFC "thingie" into the package seems like an easy sell. After all, for many companies the major cost is not the hardware but the fact that you have to go around and touch every piece of equipment. The last thing they want to do is to have to do that twice.
Coming back to your original point - Samsung's reaction is interesting. Buying LoopPay is an obvious play - except that its core mechanism has only about six months to live. Samsung does some unusual things but this doesn't seem to be one of them. There's obviously something else in the company that S finds valuable. Maybe technology-under-development, maybe customer base, maybe something else. But there has to be something else - the basic LoopPay stuff is too short term.
I guess we'll see "in the fullness of time"
