> Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.

Not even that. A lot of his failures saw the light of day, we have just forgotten about them. The same we will do with the current ones.

This, BTW, applies to all companies. To reach this point the Surface line has gone through a lot of mediocre products and bad decisions, we just don't think about them anymore. And Windows 10 still has some serious pain points that need to be worked out, specially on the Surface line with touch interfaces.