That's my understanding too. Transistors had been talked about since solid state diodes where discovered decades earlier, MOSFETs had been proposed in the 1920s but nobody could make one.

Valves were big, power hungry, and unreliable. I am sure when they first got a working transistor in 1947 they knew exactly how valuable it was.

There was a working transistor radio by 1952, and prototype integrated circuits by the late 1950s. They weren't hanging about.