This. The main driver of 3DS, as I understand it, is to sell a service to merchants which promises to lower their costs related to fraud liability. Additional security for cardholders would have been a side effect, had 3DS actually been a good security scheme.

In defense of Visa, et al, this is hard to get right. Take, for example, SET, which uses PKI and is probably much more secure, but is impractical to implement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Electronic_Transaction