That's a point that I think is not widely appreciated. The main problem there, I believe, is that Copernicus always gets compared to Ptolemy, but Ptolemy's model was wrong for a host of other reasons that don't necessarily have anything to do with its core differences from Copernicus' ideas. The crucial problems with Ptolemy's model that Copernicus saves you from is that Ptolemy's includes incorrect notions about motion, inertia, gravity, and most importantly, the distance to the stars. Once you correct them, you find that there is nothing special about the motion of the Earth, which was really the core error in the Ptolemy model. But we tend to put too much stress on other details of that model that are easily disproved, like how the phases of Venus show that Venus goes around the Sun. The first telescope would have disproven Ptolemy even if there had been no Copernicus-- that's not really the crucial issue.

A more interesting comparision is between Copernicus and the model of Tycho Brahe, because Tycho made all the same errors the Greeks did about inertia, motion, gravity, and the distance to the stars, but he had better data than Ptolemy, so he knew Ptolemy's model didn't work. So he was led to the idea that all the other planets orbit the Sun, not the Earth, but he still had to have the Earth be stationary so he had to make the Sun orbit the Earth! This is not nearly the "paper tiger" that is Ptolemy's model, because it is actually much more like Copernicus' model, it just focuses attention on that most key of questions: is the motion of the Earth special in some way?

So it does require Newton's laws to give us the answer to this, nothing less will really suffice. Newton's laws unify our understanding so completely that they leave no room for the sterile idea that the Earth's motion is special, and that's what selects Copernicus over Tycho. Note I do not say we know whether the Earth orbits the Sun or the Sun orbits the Earth, because general relativity tells us that this is a meaningless question-- it is how we choose to look at it. But what we can say is that there is nothing special about the motion of the Earth, relative to other planets, that derives in anything but the fact that we are here and can therefore choose to treat its motion as special for purely subjective reasons. This is the real culmination of that debate, once the gross flaws in the Ptolemy model are dispensed with via even the most rudimentary telescopic observations, and once the Greek (and Tycho's) misconceptions about motion and gravity are corrected.

Reaching this destination required Galileo's notions about inertia, Newton's notions about the sources and nature of forces, and even to some extent Einstein's notions about the arbitrariness of reference frames. What will be the next chapter?

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Logic is the grammar of truth.

Meaning and absolute certainty are incompatible, and profound meaning and absolute certainty are profoundly incompatible.

The only thing intelligence is capable of is recognizing itself.