I'd also say that the only thing that may stop Apple Pay from being a business failure is that it's Apple doing it this time (even tho, frankly, their UI looks significantly worse than Google Wallet, and has far less functionality, and Google Wallet is no longer impeded by the carriers)...
But that's not what the article section i quoted was talking about. It just made an unqualified claim "this is the first time an OS maker has made a payments product for the physical world"