How is bitcoin going to be able to compete with credit cards, when credit cards are able to let me charge small amounts without making me wait for hours?
Hopefully you are using the Bitcoin client v0.3.23 or higher, so that when a fee is required, the fee paid can be as little as a half millibit (or 0.0005 BTC, ... which is under a U.S. penny at the current exchange rate). With a fee, it is unlikely that your transaction will not be included in the next block or two. Though that still is a night and day difference from the two-second time that a credit card authorization takes.
There are some interesting developments in this though, ... between the Mt. Gox Voucher, or simply accepting the risks for small transactions and taking a bitcoin transaction as payment without even requiring a single confirmation.