From what I can see, there are three reasons why they are in a worse position to create a new, successful product than any other startup or big company.
1. They are already pretty big and successful. It's extremely hard for companies to really shift focus unless they're truly desperate. Opportunities that are great in the long term usually seem painfully small, or impossibly distant, in the short term, and it's hard to attract and motivate talent internally to these projects.
2. They seem overly confident. This is annecdotal, but they do seem to have a culture that breeds and rewards a bit of cockiness. That doesn't bode well for them rewarding people who push a humbler view of the company and empathize deeply with new kinds of users.
3. Their grand vision isn't very good, and that likely reveals a deeper lack of understanding about life and human nature. From what I understand, their guiding mission is roughly to help people share experiences in real time and more or less live in the moment. The thing is, most people don't want to share all that much of their lives with many people - most people want to escape their own lives most of the time. And for those who do want to share, there are many different more or less equally good ways to do it. Snapchat's core functionality is easily comoditized. There's no benefit to scale for Snap's users, given the company's vision. Yet they don't seem to realize that or care. And that's a critical mistake. It doesn't exactly build confidence in their ability to execute.
That said, the fact that they see themselves as a camera company does bode well. I suspect we will be a much more camera-centric culture in five or twenty years than most people think. And their playfulness is a great way to overcome the creepiness of cameras. They may end up in the right place at the right time to ride that wave.