Well, maybe. If you want to use a mobile phone for something really secure, like payments, then you need access to some tamper-resistant area of memory (what is known as the “secure element” in current parlance). It’ spossibel that this could be on a removable smart card (in SD card format), but in the GSM world it looks like it’s going to end up on the SIM, which is under operator control. So it may be that operators have lost control over the applications (which, as you correctly point out, was their own fault) but they may still be able to get something out of the value chain by providing a useful service around identity, digital signatures and such like.