That's an awfully presumptuous statement. One might have said the same thing to several generations of mobile manufacturers. After all, there was Palm and Windows Mobile. Then along came RIM. Who could have predicted the extraordinary collapse of Blackberry just 5 or 6 years ago?
I think people too often underestimate the instability of the mobile market. There was at one time a very compelling reason to stick with any given mobile OS because of the investment that was made in purchasing apps. Now, most of the important pieces are moving to "the cloud" which effectively removes the OS tie-in. All a developer needs is a GUI and perhaps a little bit of local storage for almost any non-game app.
To say WebOS was doomed, I think, gives users too much credit. There are plenty of brand loyal folks out there that won't be convinced of anything that doesn't fall in line with what they already believe. But for the most part, people just want the "best" device which is up to the marketing. That's where WebOS failed; they went with a creepy ghost woman who did here best to imply all of the capabilities of the OS instead of showing off how much more usable the OS is in a productive capacity. Palm had plenty of brand loyal people in the business community that they shoveled aside in favor of the consumer market. Had they gone straight after RIM instead of trying to compete with Apple everything would be different.
In other words, they weren't "doomed regardless." Hell, they weren't doomed at all until marketing failed.