Two fallacies there.
1: 4e lasted longer than either 3.5 or 3.0. Are we going to call 3.0 a miserable failure then?
That also a way to skew numbers. 4 and 4.5 combined (Yes, Essentials is 4.5) lasted a lot shorter than 3E/3.5E. And even when following your premise that 3E and 3.5E can't be counted together while 4E and Essentials can, 3.5E still lasted longer.
4E lost/drove away a lot of the playerbase of D&D, damaged the brand name and created D&Ds now biggest competitor. Its hard to call that anything but a failure from an economic point of view.
2: 4e offered more general non-combat support than any other edition. To the DM it offered a structure and pacing mechanic (Skill Challenges) unmatched by any other edition of D&D.
Unmatched? No. Except you mean a way to abstract every non combat activity into a string of dice rolls which mathematically didn't really work as designed while removing a lot of out of combat skills because they were not important to "adventuring". In that 4E was very successful.