I disagree. This is basically where RFID has its benefits. Transport for London has the Oyster card, which I'm pretty sure is "electronic cash", i.e. your balance is stored on the card. This allows the system to work without the huge point of failure that is a central database and the connections to it. They have millions of people passing though thousands of checkpoints, many of them on moving busses. The infrastructure needed to make sure that every single one of these checkpoints can at any given time instantly run a transaction on the central database vs. having autonomous readers that just needs to upload their log every once in a while is huge.
It's basically the difference between mainframes/dumb terminals and P2P.
The problem is that RFID implementers have been cheap with the security on those chips. It's pretty simple to make a secure setup (famous last words....) tried and true ideas from cryptography (public key infrastructure etc..) but these call for more expensive chips, and when the choice is between expensive crypto that works and cheap security-through-obscurity that works until a grad-student is bored for the summer, you're going to go with the latter, of course.