Why are U.S. banks slow to adopt features long used abroad, such as chip-and-PIN cards, pay-at-table systems, and easy free transfers between customers?

User pretty much nails it with the three points mentioned. For starters, the US does not have a real-time switch that connects all the banks for instantaneous funds settlement, unless they hop on to some 3rd party financial network (like an ATM network, etc.) Even then, most banks don't offer a direct interbank funds transfer facility as is offered in Europe, Asia, etc.

In UK, Europe, much of Asia, the IBFT facilities are promoted and encouraged by the financial regulator. The US regulator has no such plan in play.

The whole US banking ecosystem is huge. Its not easy to have across the board services for all banks (big or small), albeit a lot many companies are trying this.

The vested interests of existing players and existing systems (think ACH, etc.) prevent banks from making the move, even though a lot has been discussed and planned out, results are very slow, and traction amongst the major players, questionable.

US Regulations also play a big hurdle, especially the issue of a money transmitter and store-value cards. These two factors (in my opinion) inhibit growth of the US financial startups.

There was an excellent Dwolla report on how much money banks make via the slow and archaic ACH system, their motive to change that is dwarfed by the fact, that the sizeable income they are earning, would vanish.

At its core, the thing feeding this beast and moving your money from Bank A to Bank B is a 40-year-old system, facilitating a $33.9 trillion dollar exchange, called the Automated Clearing House (ACH). Unfortunately, the way that it works, the processes that it requires, and the parties needed to be involved, take transactions two to five days to clear. Compounded by 80+ reject codes (which have a full 90 days for everyone to wrestle with), rampant fraud and unrealistic hours of operation, ACH isn’t the engine for real-time payments. It’s old reliable but it needs a helping hand to go real-time and not take a holiday break.

and this sentence just about sums it up:

What worked well back when Disco and rotary phones were a good idea doesn’t work well now, and instead of innovating a new solution, we handed off the reins to Visa and Mastercard.

Source: ACH goes real time with FiSync. Free for banks and credit unions.

Believe it or not, despite the rational thinking, the US market is very price sensitive and intensely competitive. Money can only be made if your business plan includes a very large swath of the US banking customers, a variable which the likes of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, et. al. control very much today.

Alternative payments are inevitable, along with the common-sense ease of paying each other, but it would most likely still be offered by the giants.