A few years ago I bought a product called a Flip. It was a standalone video camera that was dirt simple to use, took decent quality video and was cheap.
It came along at the right time, just before the iPhone took off and people realized that their phone's camera was good enough from most of their video needs.
Flip understood that they were a product mascarading as a company and sold to Cisco.
Pebble is similar in that they were the right product at the right time. Their failure was in not realizing they had a window of a few years to build their product and sell. There's nothing wrong with that, lots of products, like the flip, are valuable for only a few years before their main features get consumed into other devices and they become obsolete.
I'm really not sure how the board let the CEO make the decision to not sell when they had an offer on the table.
I'll buy the book when it comes out as its probably a good case study of product not company.