First off, the "another failed phone OS" comment is ridiculous. webOS is largely what HP was interested in. It's been developed in a few years by a fairly small team and has obviously added a significant amount of value to the company and the resulting sale price. It seems like a great OS to use; I don't own a palm device. Both critically and financially it has been a success.
This whole discussion is speculation... Once can objectively state that RIM is pretty far behind in delivering a modern mobile OS, even those targeting enterprise customers. I didn't even mention the fact that application development for the platform is somewhat of a nightmare, something that will be increasingly important to a CIO.
Regardless, arguably, the consumer market is in fact a lot more important to the company both today and going forward than you've made note of. Look at the company's marketing material: it is generally centered around media playback or BBM.
Buying Palm, porting BBM to WebOS, and slapping the Blackberry logo onto the Pre and Pixi would be a pretty easy way to improve their position in the consumer market.