EMV is happening in the United States; the industry does recognize the problem though I agree there are poor incentives to make progress in solving it. It is late in starting and going to be slow and that is for some of the reasons OP states.
One thing that is now changing is that responsibility for charge-backs is going to be moving from the merchants and card issuers (who do bear risk in ATM transactions, for example) to the acquiring point of sale network, operator or ATM. In order to prevent that from happening, the operators are being required to support EMV in X% of devices by Y date. MasterCard has a write-up of this here: http://www.mastercardadvisors.com/_assets/pdf/emv_us_aquirer...
You can Google "EMV acquirer risk" to find more on this issue.
One thing that is now changing is that responsibility for charge-backs is going to be moving from the merchants and card issuers (who do bear risk in ATM transactions, for example) to the acquiring point of sale network, operator or ATM. In order to prevent that from happening, the operators are being required to support EMV in X% of devices by Y date. MasterCard has a write-up of this here: http://www.mastercardadvisors.com/_assets/pdf/emv_us_aquirer...
You can Google "EMV acquirer risk" to find more on this issue.