The way Elop treated Nokia's technologically superior platform was very transparently not in the interest of Nokia. The subsequent sale must have landed him a lot of money. I'm curious what Elop is doing now ...
It was clear before the Elop memo that Nokia's phone business was becoming a very expensive albatross. If they had stuck with Symbian and MeeGo, the financial situation in 2013 wouldn't have been much different from what actually happened with the Microsoft deal: under pressure from Apple and Android, the phone unit was losing money to the tune of hundreds of millions per quarter. Except this time, there wouldn't have been a buyer lined up to pay $4+ billion for it.
So Nokia absolutely did manage to offload the phone business just in time. Microsoft ended up writing off the whole purchase price.
An Elopless Nokia in 2015 would look a lot like Blackberry. Not quite bankrupt, but not in a happy place even though it had a technologically superior new OS and a brand that used to be worth a lot.
I also would like to think that after the Snowden revelations Nokia would have been able to convince many organisations that security and privacy are not dead, and that ones mobile phone is probably the most invasive technology in use.
It goes where you go, it listens to what you say, it reads what you read. It should have only one master - its owner. So far Jolla never had the scale, the public visibility or the political profile of Nokia as the European champion of technology. That story could have been told by Nokia far better.
It was done to "save" Windows Phone only to have it die a more lingering death.
True Fact: Microsoft still lists at least one Nokia X handset on their site. The "Nokia X platform" is based on AOSP.
I would not bet against Nokia X becoming a "Microdroid" like Amazon Fire OS.