If you are aiming to have your chips in a decent portion of all mid/high-end phones sold, which they appear to have been aiming for, then the Nintendo Switch isn't really that much of a consolation prize. The Switch had very high sales... for a console, with 150 million over 7 years. Smartphone sales peaked at 1.5 billion units a year. You'd probably prefer to be Qualcomm than Nvidia in this particular market segment, all things considered.
... Where are you getting that? The iPhone _alone_ sells about 200 million units a year.
There are almost 5 billion smartphone users; sales of 300 million a year would imply that those are only replaced every 16 years, which is obviously absurd.
On a separate note, speaking of the average lifespan of a phone, I'm fairly sure that with how expensive they're becoming, smartphone lifespans are increasing. Especially with:
* hardware performance largely plateauing (not in the absolute sense, that of "this phone can do most of what I need")
* the EU pushing for easy battery and screen replacement and also for 7 years of OS updates
* the vast majority of phones having cases to protect against physical damage
I wouldn't exactly say it was a failure, all those chips ended up being used in the Nintendo Switch