Well, there are many Americans who spend a considerable amount of time abroad. I think it's reasonable to expect that our credit cards will work efficiently wherever we go - that, after all, is the promise the banks and networks make.

But even if you never set foot outside the USA, there are a few answers to your question, "why do you prefer PIN." First, there's a psychological answer: studies show that people are quite willing to incur a cost just to punish a rule breaker or cheater, even if incurring that cost results in no direct benefit. There's probably an evolutionary reason for that, but just at a basic level, we don't like cheaters and lawbreakers. We all know that cloning magstripe credit cards is a huge criminal industry, and chip-and-pin offers the best protection (for now) against that. Chip-and-pin costs me nothing in convenience or money, so of course I'm in favor of it if it will prevent theft.

You could say, "who cares, it's the banks that lose to these criminals, not the customer," but of course the banks just pass the costs on to their customers (in the form of higher interest rates and/or less generous points offers). In the short term, yes, it's costing a lot to convert to PIN terminals, and yes, merchants are bearing a lot of that cost and it's mostly the banks who will benefit, but that's a different debate.

Finally, I actually don't think there is any inconvenience to the customer to be forced to convert entirely to chip-and-PIN - in fact, it's the opposite. In my experience, chip-and-PIN transactions actually go faster than signature. And being asked to remember a 4 digit PIN is hardly different from being asked to remember it for my ATM card - in fact, I can set them up so they have the same PIN.