Seems to me this would be for good cause. If you administered these things, why would you go to the effort of acquiring a secured payment platform only to let people run whatever they choose on them? The bank card industry suffers ingenious data thefts left and right, so you'd be hard pressed to blame them for this. That said, if their customers are demanding it in droves, and there is a revenue stream to be shared, and their engineers can inspect and sign the code, that's what will get them on board. They are fairly receptive to my time and attendance app for those reasons.
Look here, a Vx570 with smartcard reader for $299: http://www.terminaldepot.net/products/VeriFone-VX570-6mb-w%7B47%7D-Smartcard.html
Despite it only having 6 MB of memory, that goes a LONG way on this platform as compared to an app for a PC. My time and attendance app, complete with a statically linked TCP/IP stack with SSL, is only about 0.5 MB. This device isn't going to be able to hold the whole block chain by any means. But it would be perfect for kicking off transactions from a MYBITCOIN or equivalent, or talking to a participating bitcoind when needed.
The real travesty, the way I see it, is how valuable retail merchants consider the surface area of their countertop. You can easily put another terminal in there for less than $400, they're more likely to balk at having to have one more gadget. That said, at this early stage, if they really want to deal in Bitcoins, they're not going to mind.