Making GURPS 4e more appealing is really easy.  It needs some free supplements for GURPS lite covering Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Supers in a clean and clear and GENERIC fashion.

They've failed with things like GURPS WWII, HELLBOY, and Disc World because they're too specific to a specific niche.  As many people and more won't buy Hellboy as will buy it for the same reason: because it's Hellboy.

The absence of a Generic GURPS Fantasy Lite is really sad.  You'd need to reproduce a few pages from the Basic Set for the magic system and a few Pages from Bane Storm for races and monsters.  That's all it would take.

GURPS 4e is a great product to sell to GURPS fans but it's a lousy product for making new fans.  It's too big, intimidating, and complete.

To me, the interesting thing about the success of Pathfinder isn't that 3.x still has a lot of adherents. It was always clear that many D&D players were fiercely resistant to giving up the system.

The interesting thing is Pathfinder has upturned WotC's longstanding wisdom that splats pay the bills and adventures don't make money. Paizo's business model is based on a regular flow of adventure material. The core books are gravy.

It's kinda cool to see adventure design at the heart of a successful RPG company, rather than splats and rules bloat. Stylistically, I'm not sure Paizo's adventure paths are my thing. But the format and execution are brilliant. They've tapped into a huge market for sparkling, professional adventure books that WotC had  neglected.