It did fail in devliering the actual product that was intended, but yeah, they did salvage a lot of it and also AFAIK helped the SQL Server team improve a few things. So it's a bit like Intel's Larrabee (which did technically come out as a product, Xeon Phi) as well: A high profile R&D project.
Much of the consumer-facing niceties of it got implemented in search tools that track metadata separately.