What you just described is exactly <i>how</i> Apple killed NFC adoption.<p>The lack of NFC, or even announcing plans for NFC, from Apple made it very difficult to develop anything useful for NFC.  Without universal market share and with an uncertain future, NFC was avoided by many hardware developers who would have built anything useful.<p>June 2012 was the hinging point because it was when NFC payments were just picking up steam, but Apple elected to try to build their own walled-garden payments system using Passbook and bar codes.