I don't think anyone ever called it a Microsoft bailout. And the people who lost their jobs, both at Microsoft and Nokia back then, wouldn't consider this such a rewarding, positive thing.
Speaking as former employee, I see the board as the ones where the blame actually lies.
They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
Has anybody told the story of what happened at Nokia?
I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.
Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
My view on that is that Nokia has always been a hardware company with a weak software culture. They weren't able to write software of the complexity required to compete with iOS, so they acquired Symbian first (yes they did that after iPhone was already in the market) and Qt later. Neither avenue produced something that could compete on the market fast enough, so the board hired Elop to fix it with Windows Mobile.
It's common. Look at Samsung with Tizen, or basically any pre-Android/iOS mobile manufacturer. The skills needed to make software and hardware are very different. Apple is one of the few companies in the world that successfully built combined teams.
They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.