The bit where the developers themselves still tell people not to use it except for alpha testing, the bit where they still haven't worked out the path-finding problem at all except by flooding the whole network with the state of the whole network (that bit literally requires new computer science), the bit where you need to be online 24 hours a day monitoring your connection to make sure the other party in the channel doesn't take your money ... it's very experimental stuff at best.
Maybe they'll get it up to production grade in time, but long experience of the crypto/blockchain sector tells me that absolutely nothing that's "coming soon" should be assumed to exist until it actually does. And given the bit of LN where they need new computer science, and the other bit where a network of prepaid channels is completely consumer-obnoxious, I'm afraid I'll be classing it in that category.
So who's the vendor at Brisbane Airport? You've got me interested in chasing details now. The curse of bitcoin's merchant case was that almost nobody used it, particularly not bitcoiners. (A few vendors did well - I know the guy who ran the bitcoin-accepting pub in London, he did great until the clogged network made it unusable.)
