To be clear, I'm not trying to get around the small fees, only envisioning the speeding up of the process for the vendor and patron on a single transaction from a single wallet.

If I'm a stranger on the road traveling from point A to Point B, and stop for gas, take a piss, and buy some snacks, it's a given that the merchant will probably never see me again.

The establishment accepts Bitcoin, and the grand total of my purchase equals $54.39. I have $217.88 currently in one of my wallets. I swipe my card, and immediately the transaction is approved, and have receipt in hand. But for the next 10 minutes or so, I don't have $163.40 readily available to me, but only $109.01 until all the required confirmations are in, in still the approximately 10 minute time frame.

Does that seem clearer?

Hell, the fees are so small, normally less than a penny, why the hell can't the patron pay the fee instead of the merchant? Fuck it, make both pay, either splitting the fee or double it, giving it to the miners protecting the system of things.

Better yet, make it a penny for each and every transaction over a dollar, regardless, with every transaction less that a buck have zero fees.

A credit card authorization ensures that the customer's credit account is open, is in good standing, and has sufficient funds to complete the submitted transaction.  If the card passes these checks, the issuing bank will place a hold on the funds for the amount of the authorization.

When looking at your credit card statement online you might see these transactions as being marked "pending" or "authorization hold".

Unless the transaction was "authorization only" (e.g., in the rental car scenario) the "pending" transaction is at some part of the several-day process for transferring funds from the customer's charge account to the merchant's bank account.  This is known as settlement.

Bitcoin doesn't have this same process flow however.  You could approximate the 0/unconfirmed being the "authorization" request and a transaction reaching six confirmations as being similar to "settlement", but these cannot be used interchangeably.

When the credit card authorization is made, the card issuer has the "master node" which is the authority as far as the customer's balance goes.

With Bitcoin there is no master node.  There is no single authority.  

So the double spending risk with Bitcoin has to do with the chance of getting a false positive when accepting a payment transaction that has no confirmations.  With no "master node" available, a merchant checks against the most recent copy of the blockchain to determine that the coins used to spend haven't already been spent.  

That would work, except that a dishonest person can cause the merchant to believe the transaction is valid while at the same time (or later time even) that dishonest party can then broadcast a different transaction that ends up spending the same funds a second time.

The use of 0/unconfirmed allows false positives (i.e., a Bitcoin client might show that funds were received when at a later time a block may arrive with conflicting information) and the initial 0/unconfirmed transaction will disappear as if it had never been made.

Because there's no way to see what is in future blocks then until those future blocks are mined a merchant is exposed to risk of a double spend.

There are various double spend attacks, but to a retail merchant the race attack is the primary one to be concerned with.  A merchant may use a payment processor (such as BitPay) or may go the do-it-yourself (DIY) route.  The bitcoin.org client can be configured to protect against being super-vulnerable to the race-attack by not enabling incoming connections and to have outgoing connections be made to well-connected nodes.   There are additional protections that could possibly be built to assist merchants however so few merchants accept on 0/unconfirmed today there hasn't been strong calls for these protections.

For instance, a 0/unconfirmed from someone paying with recently received coins that too haven't yet confirmed is more risky than is a 0/unconfirmed payment from someone who paid using coins that already have had more than six confirmations.  Or another example is a payment made that ends up being low priority due to its size or having no fee paid, etc.   The merchant can tell right away that the transaction will not confirm quickly and might want to delay crediting the payment as the longer the transaction stays unconfirmed the less cost there is to an attacker using rogue mining nodes who will process double spend transactions for a fee.

A bricks and mortar merchant like Cups and Cakes in San Francisco doesn't have much exposure to a double spend attack because it is economically unprofitable.  Let's say a race attack against them succeeds one out of twenty times (probably even a conservative estimate, the more likely rate could be one out of fifty or worse even).  So that means the dishonest customer is visiting 19 times in order to get the 20th cupcake order for "free".  Cups and Cakes probably earns more than 5% profit on each sale, so even with this double-spend exposure they are not losing money due to an occasional double spend.

I firmly believe that this is the long term solution to both this situation as well as for moving micro transactions off the blockchain.

Eventually there will be trusted third parties.  (Call them banks, call them escrow services, call them credit card companies, it really doesn't matter what you choose to call them).  These trusted third parties will hold insured deposits of bitcoin and will provide instant transfer between accounts they hold (and probably between the service providers as well).  They will also provide a "charge-back" service that will make transactions reversible to protect the consumer.  When we start to see such services competing, we'll know that bitcoin is truly "mainstream".

And that is fine.  Some services may provide exactly what you are describing.  Others may provide service as I described it.  Then the consumers will choose which service they prefer, and the merchants will choose which service they are willing to tolerate to increase sales.  Eventually one service may fail due to insufficient usage/revenue to cover costs, while the other flourishes and increases profits.  This is how the free market works.

I have my prediction as to which service will succeed, you have yours.  As I said, when we see competing services like this, we'll know that bitcoin is truly mainstream.  It will be fun to see which of us is right.

I think the third parties, like exchanges, will handle all these instant confirmation things. The raw bitcoin nodes with blockchains can only do zero confirmation almost-instant-updates about what you spend or what merchants will receive. Like Satoshi Dice works on zero confirmations, but I'm guessing only for those small bets. Within seconds you find out if you won or you lost, but you don't get to spend the money in your wallet until after at least one block is confirmed.