Aside from the potential effect on upgrades of "the lost decade"(or decades, sources differ) that started in the early 90s; it actually seems like a reasonably common pattern: technology buildouts that are impressive and functional for their time have a habit of becoming entrenched and(through some combination of relative adequacy vs. rev.1 of the new stuff and incumbents with investments they don't want to write off) remaining stickier longer than one would like.
We certainly saw a similar thing in the US with, say, wireline telco: you may not have loved the monopoly prices; but aggressive coverage levels were a national policy, reliability was high, and Bell Labs was doing all sorts of neat stuff. That all proved to be...unhelpful...when it came to cellular adoption at either reasonable prices or with reasonable handset features: stateside a Blackberry was the future; everyone else was dealing with carrier-locked BREW garbage and paying per-SMS(and paying more for WAP, except that that sucked so much that most people couldn't be bothered); while over in Europe pay-per-SMS was much less of a thing; and Symbian-type arguably-smartphones were reasonably common; and Japan had i-mode and all the handsets built around its still-a-weird-proprietary-mess-but-way-the-hell-better-than-WAP capabilities.
Of course, that ended up being the same phenomenon again, in its turn: US carrier-based services(SMS, MMS, WAP, etc.) were expensive or hot garbage or both; which made the US market ripe for rapid adoption of 'contemporary' style smartphones that do support cellular standards; but are fundamentally oriented around doing as much as possible over TCP/IP with the carrier just acting as a pipe; because only Blackberries were even remotely non-garbage as more telco-oriented 'smart' phones. In Europe and Japan the old style didn't last forever; but the relative quality and sophistication of pre-"It's all just TCP/IP on a small computer; right?" style designs actually gave the iphones and androids a run for their money. In some cases (like ability to do contactless payments in certain subway systems and things from your phone) the new gear remained a regression in certain respects for years afterwards.