What frustrates me is the way everyone talks about Apple Pay as if it's the standard in mobile payments. Everyone calls contactless payments Apple Pay, which is technology other countries have had for many years built into the cards themselves via an NFC chip. Visa calls it PayWave(TM), because you just wave your credit card over the terminal to pay. I have been taking advantage of the benefits of contactless pay since 2011 with PayWave. Phones later came out with NFC support and now we can emulate this "contactless" signal with the phone's NFC chip rather than those in credit cards. Other than the added security of making up a new card number for your particular credit card when you add it to your digital wallet (read: Google Pay or Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, etc.), and separate accounting, there's no difference from contactless payments that have been around for OVER a decade now.
We talk about Apple Pay as if that's the standard. We talk about Apple Pay as if it's what allows you to pay with your watch. It's not. Contactless payments are. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactless_payment. The intro paragraph:
> Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards, key fobs, smart cards, or other devices, including smartphones and other mobile devices, that use radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near field communication (NFC, e.g. Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Fitbit Pay, or any bank mobile application that supports contactless) for making secure payments.
So as you can see, Google Pay is practically identical to Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, etc. and neither of them are the standard. NFC payments are. And they don't have to be in an Apple device.