My guess....
The end result is that the consumer will lose in the case of actual fraud but there is the outside possibility that interest rates on the card balances MIGHT decrease if overall instances of fraud decrease at the card issuer.
The card companies are only willing to absorb the fraud charges because they can't PROVE that the named cardholder is the person actually charging for the item. As more security features are introduced to increase the reliability that every charge made is ONLY made by the authorized cardholder, the burden to prove the charge was NOT the consumer will ultimately be shifted to the consumer from the card company). Actual loss of the physical card required for the authentication is not the fault of the issuer...but the customer and thus the liability should be the customer's.
The card companies wouldn't be pushing this out unless it saved them significant money....as the transition is going to be expensive in itself.
VG