I find the opposite. My phone is just in my pocket, I pull it out tap the fingerprint scanner and I'm ready. My card is tucked away in my wallet and takes a bit longer.

Admittedly being out of battery is a hard problem, but I chose my phone partly because it has decent battery life.

Two reasons Apple Pay is better than contactless cards. One is security. For purchases over a certain amount, cards make you enter a PIN. This is inconvenient and also susceptible to attack. Apple Pay secures every single transaction with your PIN, made convenient by Touch ID.

Two, if "faffing about" is your concern (thank you for that expression by the way, i'm going to start using it), pulling out a card is not really much different from pulling out a phone. But the Apple Watch supports Apple Pay, and that way you don't have to pull out anything. It's really convenient.

If you're wondering how it works securely with the watch, it's pretty smart. You unlock the watch with a PIN when you put it on. It senses when you've removed it from your wrist, so it just stays unlocked until that point. Therefore all Apple Pay purchases are PIN authorized without having to prompt you for it or a fingerprint. All you have to do is wave your wrist by the terminal and confirm.

I am in Australia and we have had contactless payments for years. Apple Pay with an iPhone was more trouble than using a card. On the other hand since I got my Apple Watch I haven't carried credit cards with me. It started out as a 1 month experiment to see if I could survive and it has never been a problem.

Phone based payments seem to have really failed to gain momentum here in Australia too; we've had contactless cards for a few years now and they've become the norm, using a phone seems to have marginal benefit over that.

My understanding is that contactless cards have limit of £30 per transaction in the UK. Apple Pay (perhaps it's the same with Android Pay?) has a significantly higher limit.