If CPFP were more widely used then a merchant could receive a zero fee transaction from it's customer and then spend outputs from that transaction and include a sufficiently high tx fee so that both tx's get confirmed then the cost of receiving a BTC payment would essentially be absorbed by the merchant, which is the statuesque for Credit Card payments.
Whilst this may indeed be possible it is something that is not being really used at the moment and I think it will require specialised software to do this which basically means that merchants are still going to use payment processors rather than just say a Bitcoin client (personally I think that we don't want to even have payment processors in the future).
Basically I think that the 1 MB limit has actually been a good thing in showing us all the issues that Bitcoin as a payment system has (beyond the confirmation times).
Hopefully these issues will all be resolved over time and Bitcoin can become a realistic alternative to other payment systems but I don't think this is likely to happen for at least some years (but its other great use cases such as person to person transactions are functioning very well right now).