It is easy to put too much meaning into these things. The best is to take it word by word. But I think you are right. Elop hoped the Lumias would sell much better than they did. With the announcement of WP8, the whole Lumia thing with WP7 seems like a big joke. It certainly is over for the Lumias, this is the end.

Or maybe he finally starts to get it, you know - ooops, what HAVE I done??!!!

The truth is that Nokia was in much worse shape than we could ever imagine. From the outside, it looked like some small adjustment would do it, but the reality was a company that had grown way out of proportions. They had no coherent sustainable plan and no product line that could survive the attack from Android/Apple or low end Chinese manufacturers. Nokia was an overemployd big blob, and the only thing that kept it going was the momentum from previous glory. Too pride to go Android and too blobby to make their own ecosystem/OS'es competitive in time.

Elop was hired to save whatever could be saved and cut away everything else. As it turned out, that wasn't much, but maybe, just maybe it was enough. We will see.