Where did Meego (and before it Maemo) fail?

I believe technologically they were on track to beat the competition (iOS and Android) so the failure(s) lie elsewhere.

1) Lack of "present mainstream-edge" devices. Nokia's engineering has been sputtering for while now, but the lack of modern devices left the field completely open to everybody else. Wrt. MeeGo, Nokia could've loaded those devices with a more basic version of MeeGo initially while showing the competition how updates are done transparently. Gadget/Nokia fans would've been happy and customers impressed.

2) As I just concluded elsewhere, Nokia's ivory towers were desperate to validate their previous, hugely expensive and poorly implemented (I'm looking at you, Symbian hairball) bets on mapping and the Ovi "portal/whatnot".

MS promised to give them a cut of the loot if Nokia promises to more or less dump all of their own competing software engineering (the idea of Qt everywhere made MS execs lose sleep). MS-elop found willing co-conspirators in Nokia's boardroom.

Now, MeeGo is in a bind. Its remaining main backer Intel doesn't really want to see that platform thrive on and drive the competing ARM-platform! ARM-centric companies OTOH don't see Intel as the ideal co-developer for the same reason. Yet for MeeGo to take off in any relevant form would require devices and yet more devices to actually run it!

One long shot of a solution would be to try and port MeeGo to as many Android devices as possible (with the most popular ones like the Galaxy S first). The rationale is that the Samsungs, HTCs and LGs aren't providing their customers the Android updates (incl. security) they need. If the switching was easy and hardware and peripherals supported, "OpenMeeGo" would become very attractive alternative to running hopelessly outdated versions of Android. if users' existing data can be migrated over and at least a few key apps run under Myriad's Dalvik (which appears to be a commercial effort though, although maybe a subset could be used)...

The new short-term revenue focused Nokia obviously sees no value in doing this but for a more independent MeeGo entity and its developer community this would at least provide a platform to build upon. And the large and influential wider geek community which Nokia has worked so hard to alienate would be a force to be reckoned with.