I wouldn't say "most places" -- after a recent trip to Europe (Ireland, England and France), the only place we couldn't use our "signature-only" card was a train ticket vending machine, every business we went to had a magnetic stripe reader and knew they had to use it when the card had no chip. (my wife's no-foreign-transaction-fee card had no chip, so we tried to use that one as much as possible)

In every case were I used a USA chip card (with no PIN), the card reader prompted for a signature, so it was no problem.

Though I really don't understand why USA issuers and merchants went with a chip-only system, seems like it would have been trivial to allow PIN too.

Though even Chip and PIN only fights a small portion of the fraud - every time I've experienced credit card fraud, it's been with internet purchases. Amex used to let me generate a temporary card number for each merchant, I used that all the time, but they dropped the service for some reason.