I think it would have been because it was a technically impressive OS with a beautiful UI created by at-the-time biggest smartphone maker in the world. iOS was first but that doesn't show it would win. Android now has marketshare and Android wasn't as good as MeeGo when it came out.

I believe if Nokia continued to invest, MeeGo would have even gotten better and they would have survived (note I worked at Nokia's subsidiary HERE maps at the time and saw early version of MeeGo. Also the hardware of the N9 was beautiful. It would have been a hit and in fact outsold the Lumia in the few countries it was delivered before they axed it).

It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.

Because they cannot comprehend the factors that meant it took the Android team 3 to 5 years working flat out to even vaguely approximate technical parity with the iPhone OS of the time.

Even given that the Android team actually did understand what they needed to do to achieve that. Nobody else in the industry did. They thought that if you just ported an OS the job was done. That’s barely even the start.