If we are completely honest, Textmate was always a sub-par editor. No Vim or Emacs style brilliantness, no BBEdit style tons of features and mature engine, no IntelliJ like, er, intelligence, no ST2 comprehensiveness, etc etc. Plus, the Textmate 1.x text engine was probably a mess too -- I remember the very first versions being laggy (and that's coming from someone who doesn't find even Eclipse laggy). That he couldn…
If you say that another editor should have been as successful, then what do you mean? That TextMate users have never heard of vim, emacs or ST2? That developers have been lazy and should have out-done TextMate (which ST2 arguably did)? I think this as clear of a deserved success as it gets - it's a programmer's editor and people decided it was the best one to program in.