Basically everything in the rocket launch is automated, there was a primary and secondary mission on board the rocket. When a problem happened with one of the engines it was shut down and still was able to complete the primary mission which was the dragon capsule but it had to consume extra fuel in order to do so and that left the secondary mission without enough fuel to deliver the orbcomm satellite within the required safety margins of the ISS. So in that aspect the rocket did exactly what it was supposed to do, it saw a problem and dealt with it completing its primary mission at a sacrifice of its secondary mission.

Edit: It could also be the case that it did have the required fuel but part of the agreement with NASA was that if any anomaly should happen that the secondary mission is aborted or that it had a specific time window where it was allowed to start its engines back up to deliver the second payload and it missed that window because it took longer to get to orbit.

I don't think they have addressed this issue yet. When they said things like "Falcon 9 did exactly what it was designed to do", all of that is 100% true. Additionally, all comments SpaceX have made so far, I think, are written about the ISS mission. They have not said anything about success or failure of other aspects of the launch, like this satellite. I assume we'll hear something eventually, but given that everything might be fine (the Orbcomm people are working to get it in the right orbit, it sounds like) they're probably just sitting tight for now.

Even if the satellite can propel itself to the correct orbit, it may burn a lot of fuel which can take years off the operational life of the satellite. Those years are worth a lot of money.

You have to take the subjective statements out of the equation. AFAIK the mission had two objectives:

1. Loft Dragon into an orbit from which it can chase and catch the ISS.

2. Loft the Orbcomm test/demo payload into some orbit specified by the customer.

During the launch they lost an engine. They still achieved objective 1. They did not achieve objective 2. The most interesting thing to know will be why they didn't achieve objective 2.

Sounds like they needed a second stage to get the Orbcomm payload to the correct orbit, but they were too close to ISS to detach the first stage rockets. This is because, after compensating for the loss of one of the engines, they didn't have enough fuel to get to the minimum-safe distance to detach the stage 1 boosters.

The rocket system worked as designed in that it recovered from a failure. The mission was a partial success (or partial failure, depending on one's outlook). No need to dramatize it.

Target orbit was 192x203 miles, actual orbit was 122 x 202 miles. These are very different numbers.