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.