iPhone 7 was successful. So was iPhone 8. iPhone X NFC failure was just that. An iPhone X NFC defect. They knew it was defective and they released it anyway. All the felica magic is in their secure element and they had it nailed down in iPhone 7 already. iPhone X NFC isn't just defective in Japan, it's defective globally. Another contributor to iPhone X's failure in Japan was the lack of TouchID.

Also Android OEMs have had Felica support forever, but only in Japan and only using specific secure elements. The issue here is that Google kept telling everyone how HCF without SE is as secure as having a secure element and kept trying to push that narrative until they didn't. Pixel phones now have two secure elements, one comes with the NFC chipset they choose - usually from NXP-, and one is their own.

Basically every bigger Android phone manufacturer nowadays has their own secure element. Oppo, Samsung, Google, Huawei. The most absurd is probably Samsung's Knox that trips when you unlock(iPhone works fine after resetting it even if you jailbreak it). And on top of that every countries NFC programming is region specific. Hongkong Knox can do Octopus, Taiwan Knox can do Easycard, Japan can do osaifu keitai(probably not stored in knox though).

This is not entirely Googles fault, but they deserve a pretty huge share of the blame. At least for the fragmentation of the payment SE solutions. And again, they've had 3 or 4 iterations of Google Pay in the way.