Ok first off, the main influence that the ME-262 had on post war jets was simply the swept wing design. This was a crucial thing; British and Ameican straight-wing jets got owned by Migs in the Korean war. To give the Germans credit, you have to remember that the ME-262 technology was available in 1939- it could have easily been put in production and in the air around 1942, maybe earlier.
That being said- if you want to understand the main reasons they lost, they are twofold:
1. They decided to start a world war with an army that was largely, as much as 90%, horse-driven. They would remain mostly horse-driven for the entire war. One of the reasons why Sea Lion was called off was due to the fact that their navy had no fleet of landing craft, and an invasion would mean finding a way to ship thousands of horses across the channel.
2. Hitler, having that then popular right-wing attitude that "will conquers all", had a nasty habit of attacking countries that had much higher production than Germany, as in the USSR(which was producing more planes and tanks as early as 1939), and declaring war on the USA when Rooseveldt would have been hard pressed to get the American people behind a war on Germany and Italy.
The Germans were only so victorious because of their manipulating skill, widespread fear of Communism(which created a lot of discreet, if not sometimes open sympathy toward the Third Reich and Fascist regimes), and once the war began, boneheaded mistakes of their opponents. As early as 1938-39, there were a dozen differnet ways the entire German military could have been dealt a death blow in relatively little time.
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