Certainly. Discovery of alternative services is vastly different when learning through a friend who had a great experience (unpaid) as opposed to learning about a service through a carefully constructed (paid) marketing plan. Often the marketing plan has significant resources compared to the investment in the product itself. The strength of a marketing effort (including how well it can convince and how well it's targeted) determines the winner. If one learns of an alternative service but the marketing sizzle has confused customers of existing products, then the advantage goes to the stronger marketing team, not the stronger product.
It seems like this would depend on whether marketing is used for good or evil. For example, showing a lot of people how your project actually works and why you might want to use it (as Apple does sometimes) is taking the high road. A stronger marketing campaign may work well due to better user education, in which case it's not necessarily "unfair" that a somewhat weaker but better-understood product wins.
But of course there are the usual dirty tricks, too, causing user confusion as you mention.
Very true. I really want to see more companies taking the high road. It's unfortunate seeing the state of marketing. The food industry for example - people are not eating more healthy meals as a result.
