(It has been more than 36 hours since this episode aired so anyone reading this thread should expect spoilers!)
1) She did not end up a loser. She ended up alone and seemingly friendless. There is a difference. In her face you saw the range of emotions: despair, to sadness, resignation. She's slapped: shock, sadness, anger dissolving into determined resolve... and she walked off to the next chapter in her life. Perfect!
2) There is a particular style of story-telling of which I am a fan. It has a name, but I am having brain-lock right now. In this style the character ends up in the same state at the very end of the story as at the beginning. If you watch the first 10 or so minutes of the pilot and the very last few minutes of the finale, you will see all the parallels. That is not to say "nothing happened". It's to say another cycle begins. The character is smarter, wiser, different by what happened in the story, but here (s)he is again ready to take on the next challenge.
A movie which I love tremendously disappointed me at the end because of this. (Spoilers for those who haven't seen "Boyhood") If you look at "Boyhood" it starts off with a 6 year-old looking at the sky and pondering what's to come. At the end, the same boy, now on the verge of being a man 12 years later is sitting in the desert with friends looking at what could become his wife. He looks at her, looks into the distance, back at her and back into the distance with a smile. I WANTED SO BADLY for him to lay back on the desert ground and look up at the sky before the cut to black. Why? he would be pondering the same questions he did 12 years earlier, only with the new perspective only age, experience and wisdom can bring.
"The Good Wife" did just this in the series finale. It is SOOOO much more satisfying than riding off into the sunset with a new beau or some sort of sappy hug and say good-bye sequence.