RIM dug their own grave though. It isn't quite that they were "suddenly" upstaged by the competition, it's that they rode their own coattails of success for too long and failed to keep innovating and improving at the pace the market was already moving at. They followed almost the exact same path Palm did only a few years prior, even down to creating a companion device nobody wanted. (c.f. Blackberry Playbook vs. Palm Foleo, although to be fair the Foleo was never released -- they realized it wouldn't sell at the 11th hour so they wisely scrapped it to start focusing on restructuring the business they were already losing fast to Windows Mobile devices because of their stagnancy.)
The difference with the E-cig industry is that it is going at full-tilt right now, and every few weeks a new latest-greatest device is released. Not all of them stick around though and many of them are of poor enough quality that even if they upstage the big guns in the short term, the big guns ultimately survive where the others don't. With regard to stocking up against Armageddon or the Zombie Apocalypse or whatever, there are plenty of tried-and-true devices you can stock up on that you know will be there and functioning when the world starts crumbling. Or at least you have a long-term power outage. eGo devices, for example, the Darwin or ProVari, or a beefy 26650 mod for that long-term vape. Those will serve you very well if you find yourself in a position where you won't be able to charge for a while. And juice has a long enough shelf life that you can stock up a reasonable amount on that so that you're not caught short.
Glad you picked that up.
