Disregarding the kind of payment, it does currently rely on NFC in terminals to work, and there are a lot of developed countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, that don't have that technology or don't support it. For example, South Korea does have the infrastructure for Apple Pay in many places (e.g. NFC enabled terminals) but their infrastructure isn't set up for it. Even beyond this, there's a lot of countries that support contactless card payment unlike the US, which makes using Apple Pay even less useful and limits its acceptance.

From what I've read the vast majority of Apple Pay payments are done in the US, so it's not unfair to call it "America-centric".