TLDR: over time, Apple transitions from one technology/development platform to another. author calls this an "invisible" strategy because... it's done properly and methodically.
It depends on your definition of "botched", but I can think of lots of examples of cases where Apple either gave up, or essentially reverted their changes, in the face of public outcry or technical hurdles.
I wouldn't really call the IIe card a "transition strategy", either, any more than Mac86 was. It was a kluge to add another entire computer as an add-on card. It didn't help move your programs or data at all. It also only emulated a IIe (8 years old at that point), not a IIgs (only 5 years old). It was only a 'transition' for the absolute penny-pinching-est buyers, i.e., education.
Copland and Taligent never shipped to developers or users so neither wasted time on it.
I had an Apple //e card. Using the included software, you could setup a ProDOS partition on your hard drive, and copy files from the //e to the Mac. Apple bundled converters that you could use to convert AppleWorks documents to Mac app documents.
Mac86 sucked but the DOS Compatibility Card for the PowerMac 6100/60 with a 486DX/2, a dedicated sound card, and the capability of adding 32MB of dedicated RAM was quite good until Windows 95 came out and it could only use 16 bit drivers. That was my second Mac.
Copland never shipped, and as such was not a transition at all, because the public was not directly involved in the internal failure. Taligent basically never shipped anything, and so the same argument applies.
The replacement OS that Apple actually shipped (OS X) aided a legacy transition that I think went down basically as well as it possibly could have (given the inherent dissimilarities between the two OSes).
HyperCard was merely killed off, so there was clearly no transition at all. That's like saying Newton->(nothing) failed as a transition.
But yes, Metrowerks saved their bacon by providing the only PowerPC compiler for quite a long time, IIRC.