They certainly seem to have thrown away a lot of their advantage from the brilliantly-executed launch. If they had followed up quickly, and avoided the real names rathole, they were on track for a huge success. Now it'll be a much tougher path. I still think it'll be at least semi-successful, but it doesn't seem as likely to take significant market share away from Facebook or Twitter any time soon.
Google+ got a lot of momentum, and then it all slowed to a crawl. And once the real names stuff broke, and got it a bunch of bad press, the traffic seemed to slow to a crawl over there.
I worry that they're going to leave it too late - that by the time they have a product worth having they'll have lost their customer base.