
I think the reason I never really played pinball was the lack of a sense of progression: I've really never been satisfied with just getting a high score for doing the same thing; I need to at least enter a different area or something in a video game to care about it.
Well, that and they were always a bit more expensive than most of the video arcade machines. There were plenty of arcade games you could start with a quarter, but the pinball machines would be closer to about $1.