Digital Wallets & Alternative Payment Systems

I'm beginning to generally read about "alternative payment systems" and digital wallets. The first step is some definitions:

conventional payment systems: cash, checks, credit cards, wire transfer, debit cards, gift cards
alternative payment systems: everything else including paypal and mobile phone payments.

Which category does a credit card count in if it doesn't get swiped? I dunno.

What is an e-Wallet? Let me quote an investment report from UBS which in its write-up of Apple's Iphone 5 Announcement, included a paragraph on the question of whether it is an e-Wallet.

Passbook is the first step to using the phone for significant
transactions. iPhone 5 does not have near-field communications (NFC) though.
Phil Schiller, SVP of Marketing, said afterwards that it’s not clear NFC is the
solution to any current problem. We think Apple’s recent acquisition of
AuthenTec, known for its innovations in fingerprint identification technology
(FPID), could pave the way for another transformative technology leap.
Integrating fingerprint ID technology into mobile and computing hardware is
likely to (1) enable secure financial transaction security, and (2) improve user
convenience by obviating the need for usernames and passwords.