Security of credit card industry is built not on hard computer security principles but on auditing and ability to point fingers. This breaks with enough levels

Security of credit card industry is built not on hard computer security principles but on auditing and ability to point fingers. This breaks with enough levels of indirection and gift cards add such additional level of indirection. Also gift cards have secondary (and probably more important) use for thieves. Giftcard is legitimately looking magstripe card that in many cases gets processed in same way as card payment, so you can just write stolen magstripe data onto giftcard and get something that does not raise suspicion (store clerk is not going to verify that card number matches or event that payment method matches).