Bitcoin clears payments faster than any other financial system I'm aware of except cash by orders of magnitude, and I do not anticipate that changing any time soon.
To take your point ad absurdum, even cash transactions aren't instantly cleared. In fact, the vast majority are never cleared at all. There's a level of trust applied with a cash transaction that the bills exchanging hands are not counterfeit. If there were to be actual verification (and I don't mean by using a magic marker), then a cash transaction would take even longer to clear than a credit card.