Originally posted here by slarty
Your argument is only valid if the chip & pin cards worked like the old cards.

The chip & pin cards are NOT magnetic strip cards and cannot be cloned on to cheap blanks. I'm not sure if they can be cloned at all - if so, then you need some pretty serious hardware to do so.
I just want to point out, Magnetic strip card can be clone or even modified it's data, whereas Smart Card can only be clone.