With bitcoin the ~10m+ tx time is a cost, but is in material if you are dealing with either a trusted party or a small amount of $
Customers don't care how long a transaction takes for the merchant.
Have you ever tried selling anything for bitcoin? Nearly no one will use it even when being told of all the "benefits". They don't want to wait 30+ minutes. When they see they need to give some exchange a scan of their passport and wait 3-5 days to link their bank account, and losing the ability to do a chargeback, they never think about using Bitcoin again.
The current story for bitcoin is pretty sad, largely due to slow adoption and not much of a good story for consumers.
The good thing is that bitcoin doesn't have to compete directly with CC companies. There are cases that it solves that CC companies aren't interested in.
There's all this concern about price volatility and tx rate, but it's been used continuously in spite of price volatility, and saying no one wants to use bitcoin because there's too many outstanding bitcoin transactions just isn't a serious argument.
I care about bitcoin because it is an interesting piece of technology that enables things that weren't possible before. I'll hold bitcoin so long as they don't go to zero, none of the concerns listed about bitcoin that I have heard are serious arguments on why it might go to zero, so I'll hold.
Current CC companies are essentially two products. One is the transaction processing side of things, and the other is the financial + insurance product which protects both parties from fraud, chargebacks etc. Crypto currencies should be able to make transaction processing effectively free. All you need is an insurance product that operates at margins lower than 2-3% (current credit cards).
So then don't use the bare blockchain for transactions.
There is always inherent distrust when money is involved. Hence the ability to charge back a fraudster. Unless of course you deal with a "trusted party" but then the chargeback argument is immaterial, it doesn't matter whether transaction is bitcoin or credit card.
Now as for settlement times, sure banks are catching up. Faster is not always better. It always leaves room for fraud. Banks are distrustful on behalf of their account holders. So a particular merchant's bank is not going directly to the customer's bank and demand money. They go to an exchange to ask for a debit and credit. This takes time.
Currently bitcoin takes 10m for how many transactions per minute? If we were to talk billions of transactions (not money but actual transactions) flowing through a payment processor and calculate the scale of bitcoin - how much time are we talking about?