If you look at how they were actually deployed in Europe, you'll realize that it's not much different over there. "Chip and Pin" is if anything worse than no encryption, because it gives the illusion of security. I don't know about the situation in Asia.
It's far from clear that chip-and-pin has been the unmitigated disaster you imply it to be. You're right that chip-and-pin has problems, but those are design and deployment problems, not problems with PKE in general.
The difference is that, using public-private key cryptography, an evil merchant can't, in any way, copy my european card. I can be sure that my CC number will not be stored.
