At the risk of sounding xkcd-esque, what is your definition of "fail"? I agree that RIM attempting to duplicate Apple's consumer-focused strategy is unlikely to yield Apple-like results in terms of market share and immediate profit, but let's remember that that's not where RIM started out. There's always a lot of money to be made in B2B, which just happens not to be the competition's strong point.
Finally, the whole smartphone area is ten years old, consumer-focused part of it less than five years old: less than mature, and way less than settled. In another ten years, this all might have turned out to be a silly bubble as Moore's law erases any effective differences between smartphones. Will Apple "fail" when its percentage profit per device and market share falls to current Macbook values?