I imagine that it also helps (at least in terms of customer acceptance) that most of these RFID tags are probably replacing something that was as bad or worse. Keys are clonable, provide no record of use(much less timestamped logs of individual users) and if one gets into the wild re-keying the place is Not Fun. Magnetic stripe cards are trivially clonable; but on the same level as most RFID tags in terms of access logging and enabling/disabling access. Adequately rugged optical sensors have historically been pretty expensive, so bar codes, hand scanners, and any other biometric gimmicks are likely niche players.
I'd be pretty annoyed if some salesweasel lied to me about it; but it's unlikely that an RFID installation replaced something that was harder to clone, and it's still easier than keys, slightly more robust than mag stripe readers, and reasonably cheap per tag. In some ways that makes it even more obnoxious to harass the researchers, though.