Depending on who your financial institution is, that may change soon. The standard is chip *and* PIN, but some banks/credit card issuers have just been lazy and not implemented the PIN part yet. For those banks that *did* comply with the full standard, the card is indeed a useless piece of plastic and silicon without the PIN number. All my chip cards are from institutions that require the PIN for any transaction; I have one swipe-only card left that I understand will be getting upgraded this year.
All of my cards are chipped. None of them requires a PIN.
Nonetheless, the chipped cards still provide security-related usefulness by, among other features, virtue of the fact that they can't be cloned as easily as mag strip only cards.
Thus the unqualified and "overstated" assertion that “without the associated PIN it is useless” is demonstrably FALSE.