If there were even a tenth as much progress in building transaction infrastructure as there has been in mining, bitcoins would be more commonly used than they are now.
Agree with you.
Development takes time. I've been working on a project part time for about 9 months that will accept bitcoin payments from day one. I've switched to full time on it but there's still a few months to go before we'll be ready for launch. Most people who know about bitcoin heard about it more recently than me, so I can only assume they are a little further behind unless they already were working on a project they could easily add bitcoin to.