Having separate meat and milk dishes wouldn’t work, since their meat isn’t kosher to begin with. (Kosher meat needs to be from particular animals, slaughtered in a particular fashion by trained people, then treated in a specific way after slaughtering.) Once they’re preparing non-kosher meat in their store, how am I supposed to know that the non-kosher meat never, ever came into contact with the food they’re still selling to me as kosher? Or the cooking implements they’re using to prepare the ‘kosher’ food?
In terms of the pilot light, it’s not that a Jew must light the pilot light, it’s that an observant Jew needs to be somehow involved in the cooking process of cooked foods for them to be kosher. If an observant Jew lights the pilot light when the restaurant first becomes kosher, and then whenever necessary afterwards (how often does your pilot light go out? Mine has been on for months, at this point.), it’s the easiest, most painless way for someone to be involved in something necessary for cooking. You could have them man the fryer, instead, but then they’d have to be there all the time!
Visiting Israel as a teenager, I had one of those small mind-blowing moments when I realized that I could just waltz into a mall food court and eat something besides ice cream. I mean, it would never have occurred to me before to do something crazy like eat pizza in a mall! Dunkin’ Donuts and some ice cream chains are just about the only chain stores where people who keep kosher can eat, in most of the US. Some drinks are kosher at Starbucks, but the only coffee chain with kosher pastries that I know of is The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in California, which is a mere rumor of wonderment to most kashrut-observant people here in NY. The first three kosher Subways have opened in the last year, and I haven’t been to any of them as yet, but if you’re curious as to how fast-food deprived/fascinated many Orthodox people feel, see this Chowhound thread from their kosher subsection on the new Subway in Flatbush, Brooklyn: Chowhound - The Site for Food Nerds: Cooking Tips, Culinary How-To's, & More. (On the other hand, the lack of kosher fast food meant that I got to read ‘Fast Food Nation’ feeling slightly, irrationally, smug, as I had never eaten in such places.)
The second kosher Dunkin’ Donuts in America opened in my hometown when I was in first grade, a few blocks from the yeshiva elementary school. My teacher brought us a box of Munchkins as a reward after our class play, and we were all blown away. How had we ever lived without these?