The techs are alright. Both things you mention are two prime examples (I'm still flabbergasted how well the voting machines thing worked out, because it had all the reasons in the world to fail).

But when you need to invest 4x more on hardware and software to have something that is 2 years older than standard hardware and software, all inside a bureaucratic state that adds dozens of legal impediments or delays to anyone who wants to make some honest money, it's easy to see why any potential entrepreneur has to tread much more dangerous waters in Brazil than it would anywhere else.

On the one hand I agree that there's a lot of complications on the non-tech side of things over there, but on the other I can't help thinking that many successful tech efforts had some non-trivial roadblocks to overcome, e.g. google (who needs another search engine?) and youtube (how are they possibly going to monetize that?) come to mind.