That is indeed part of the problem. It is all playing catch-up. Except for maybe the NFC and wallet stuff all features have been in one high-end smartphone or another. But I must say, Windows Phone 8 does combine a lot of those "best features" in 1 OS.
And if Nokia gets to sell an actual WP8 device this year, I think they may introduce cutting-edge hard- and software again on a competitive timeframe .

After introduction of the High-end device Nokia will be faced with the next challenge: What do they do with the low-end? Will they introduce low-end WP8 devices? or will those stay at Windows Phone 7.8 using Windows CE kernel, and being largely incompatible with WP8 applications?