Re: There are places in the world...
I can assure you, from experience as customer, victim and bank clerk, no one is able to check your signature that reliably. For one thing, there is a handy sample copy of your signature on the card.
I believe one of the bigger risks is somebody simply shopping on line or over the telephone, especially the latter: no pin and no signature.
The odd thing, to me, is that after all this time, the holes in the wall are still so badly designed and vulnerable and that magnetic strips are on all cards, not only by customer request, with appropriate waiver. If semi-third world countries such as USA can not keep up, but find their cards stop working in the developed world and that foreign tourists and businessmen in those countries can not spend money so easily, I suspect chip and pin will take off like a rocket in those countries.
Note that banks are adopting two strategies at least:
1. monitoring usage patterns so that they can see, automatically, any sudden, "out of character" bills.
2. geographical limiting: making the card valid within restricted, geographical areas and requiring the customer to request widening this area.
So some crook trying to use your card in the USA would find it harder on two grounds.