Things evolve in weird ways, bitcoin doesn't have a perfect way to do refunds, but it does have the ability to do escrow and to be built into contracts. It could be interesting to disallow refunds generally but be explicit in how contracts and purchases are structured so that a transaction is binding after both parties agree and confirm as much to a 3rd party escrow agent.
Credit cards, much like HTML, were a good idea built on a preceding ideas looking at the problem they were solving. So while credit cards have evolved, the now appear most similar to the Diner's club implementation popularized in the mid 50s[0]
KAZ NEJATIAN did an interesting interview in a YC podcast about his company Kash. He talks about how credit cards work on an antiquated system that, in 90% of transactions (his words) don't use anymore than the expiration date and numbers to process and compares defending processing to building a really strong door without walls.
He is neccessarily biased of course, but his explanation of the routing and auth system credit card companies used seems insane, and they aren't even value stores like banks.
Point is, things evolve in different ways and in fact, bitcoins lack of refunds (which may or may not even be true), could in fact be a massive innovation. Especially if it could deal with fraud which one could make a case for being the only valid reason for a refund. Not meeting a future obligation, could in fact be settled in the future by escrow or an insurance product one could create. E.g. I buy a laptop with a 5 year warranty and it breaks in year 4. In this contrived example, an issuer could run a system scan and verify this independently and objectively and release a predetermined payment amount, or go to a 3rd party arbitrator who would verify and release the funds.
[0]http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-cards-his...