I had something similar in Chicago that refilled automatically once it dropped below a certain amount … but it only worked on certain buses and trains. (It didn’t work for the trains that I took out to the suburbs, for instance.) And I certainly couldn’t us it for anything else other than transport.
I’m sure that any tech stuff in East Asia can be found somewhere, in some form in Europe and the US, but it’s the wider applications and the prominence in everyday life that I find to be different. And for stuff that requires wide adoption or policy implementation, like 3G networks, each of the latter regions tend to lag Asia by a couple of years.
This is like Bangkok’s Skytrain and subway. For point-to-point tickets, if you get off early, no problem. The turnstile will accept the ticket and let you out. No refund for any diference, though; that’s your penalty for not being careful enough.
If you change your mind and want to go farther, just have a word with the station staff, and they’ll set you up. I don’t know if a “fine” would be involved on top of the fare, but maximum fare on, say, the Skytrain is 40 baht (US$1.20), and any fine would be negligible, like for a library.
I use the Skytrain a lot and so keep a 30-day pass: 30 trips that must be used in 30 days, and it’s 20 baht per trip regardless of distance, so I never have to worry about changing my mind. The wife keeps a regular stored-value ticket that offers no discounts but never expires; you can fill those up to a max of 2000 baht I think it is, but the wife keeps only 100 or so, because she’s worried about losing it.