It worked for Kansas City, Provo, and Austin, and basically failed everywhere else.

I think Fiber was a bit of a miscalculation in that they misjudged where the bottleneck would be. In the early days of Fiber (I worked on it, briefly), the assumption was that key risk factors would be that incumbent ISPs would raise their speeds to match, or that marketing would fail to sign up enough customers to make the build-out economical. These turned out to not be major problems, but the incumbent ISPs blocked expansion to new municipalities through permitting & right-of-way restrictions. The assumption when I was working on it was that if Kansas City could demonstrate a successful deployment, other cities would be lining up to clear roadblocks and bring Google Fiber to their citizens; this didn't happen.

Would you say that most major cable providers now having gigabit offerings now wasn't at least partially pushed by the threat of Google Fiber? I mean, in an area Fiber never launched in now, two of the three ISPs here provide gigabit via coax now (Comcast and WOW), and I'm hard pressed to believe they would've jumped from ~150 Mbps service to gigabit service at about the same price if someone else wasn't threatening to do it first.

Sure, it took a while after Google Fiber launched, but there was a lot of infrastructure to deploy. I'd argue Google had a hand in this.