If you have fiat and bitcoin, the only reason you want to spend bitcoin is to help developing it. Ok you don't need to do that because bitcoin will be developed anyway by other generous folks, and you get to keep your wealth.
From merchant perspective, accepting bitcoin is great, since it increases in value, and there's no processing fee. On the other hands, for consumer, not only does he lose precious coins, he also loses the benefit of credit card.
Most cc give 5% cash back on gas, at least 1% on other things, not to mention those freebie insurances. You can buy exxon gift card with bitcoin using Gyft, but you'll miss that huge 5% benefit. So it makes more sense to sell coins though coinbase/campbx or what not, and use that to pay for credit card bill.
Ok, I think in order to convince consumers to spend bitcoin, merchants or services like Gyft have to come up with unquestionable better deal, like at least 6% discount, 90 days returnable, free shipping, maybe a blow job coupon.
The existing debit card companies could easily launch a bitcoin card with the added value you mention. Something like this:
smartguy@visa:~$ mkdir /btc
smartguy@visa:~$ sudo cp -ax /usd /btc
smartguy@visa:~$ cd /btc
smartguy@visa:/btc$ find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/USD/BTC/g' {} \;
smartguy@visa:/btc$ make
Don't tell them, let some others have a go at it first.
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