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Originally Posted by Legolas
In your hypothetical situation, having Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to Rivendell to inform Bilbo of his nephew's death would've been too negative a scene since Frodo would not have seen his goal to completion. A situation in which Frodo and Sam were both lost in the lava of Mount Doom after the Ring's destruction would've been more palatable to both readers and Bilbo.
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I think Tolkien would never have considered having Frodo fail to get to Mount Doom - whether through dying or appearing to be dead. Frodo seems to represent the courage of those friends Tolkien lost in the Great War; he may have been shattered by what he went through, but he went through it all the same, carrying on even though it would have been all to easy to give up and go home.
Maybe whether the quest would have been a success without Frodo hangs on whether we think Sam would have been able to follow it through? That means we must look at Sam's character. One of his failings is his anger towards Gollum, which seems to drive him at certain points in the story. His reactions to Gollum are entirely natural (I suspect most of us would find it hard or impossible to see the 'humanity' of Gollum if confronted with him), but they could also have been the undoing of any solo attempt to get to Mount Doom. Sam would almost certainly have killed Gollum given half the chance, and there is also the possibility that Gollum could have killed him; Sam may have been capable of overestimating his own physical strength.
Either way, I think Sam would certainly have bravely tried to get to Mount Doom and destroy the ring, but I do think his anger would have failed him.
Then again, what about Sam's delusions of grandeur when he wears the Ring? What do they tell us about him and his attitude towards the Ring as a bearer? What might that dark side of Sam tell us about the likelihood of his destroying it?