Yes, far from "destroying" Nokia, MS threw good money after bad to the tune of $billions trying to keep them afloat. Now they've given up on that fruitless endeavor.

3 possibilities (and probably many more):

1) go all-in with their own Symbian/Qt/MeeGo strategy

2) go all-in with Google Android

3) go all-in with a Nokia fork of Google Android (a nonstarter today, but back in 2011, with Nokia's considerable heft and before Google started rolling so much of Android into non-open Google Play Services, things could have played out differently)

In terms of Nokia's performance as a phone company, it is more or less impossible for any of these options to have done any worse than Nokia did with Windows Phone.

HOWEVER, for Nokia as a company, Windows Phone "worked out" in the sense that they had a willing buyer for an asset that was long-term uncompetitive against Asian players in a commodity market. (then again that too has a counter-argument that the phone division would have been worth more than $7 billion had it not dedicated itself to the losing proposition of Windows Phone)

They could've been in Samsung's place if they hadn't bet the farm on Windows Phone.

They were too proud to simply adopt Android. They were broken before they made deals with Microsoft.

Shame - personally I think people would have bought a Nokia Android phone. They were renowned for their hardware.