Is Passbook a trojan horse for 'pay by iTunes'?

Now that the dust has settled on last night's iOS 6 announcements, much of the attention is focused not on Siri for iPad or Facetime for 3G, but Passbook.

For those of you that missed it, Passbook aggregates together various m-commerce applications in one place so that users can simply flash a QR code or similar at a participating retailer to redeem their offer.

There's nothing innovative about this per se since all these partners are, by implication, already running these offers and apps.

What it does do is what Apple always does: makes the whole thing easier.

So instead of managing a growing number of discrete siloed loyalty or payment apps across different parts of your phone screen, they can all now be in one place.

And not only that, Apple will make sure that these products are real-time/location-enhanced so that they display when the user is in the relevant shop/airport etc. They can even do so from the lock screen. The effect is to shave even more time off the process of looking for an app and opening it.

As usual, Apple has acted pretty smartly here. In a sense it's learning from what happened with plastic, where a craze for individual store cards burned brightly for a while before consumers got fed up and consolidated around a smaller number.

It's easy to see early adopting iPhone users embracing this enthusiastically.

But there's so much in it for Apple too. All those partners will be excited about the inevitable surge in consumer sign-ups prompted by Passbook. But you can bet Apple will keep the data about what its users buy and where they travel.

In fact, it's not hard to imagine conflicts emerging from this. Could retailers follow publishers in objecting to Apple's ownership of this data? I wouldn't be surprised.

But the billion dollar question is whether Passbook is Apple's stepping stone to a full blown iWallet?

At present, as far as I can see, payments can be processed using Passbook (at Starbucks for example, using a QR code) but Apple is not present anywhere in the process.

In this sense Passbook falls short of what many observers believe Apple is cooking up – ie the extension of iTunes into the high street.

The received wisdom is that Passbook will prepare the way for a much bigger launch, which will emerge when NFC is built into the expected iPhone 5 this summer.

In this scenario, iPhone users will be able to pay for goods at contactless NFC readers using their iTunes accounts, and the whole process will be sweetened by the fact that Passbook will get populated with location and time-specific offers.