Controlling plug-in activation

I am working on the development of a plug-in, the WordPress Mobile Pack that is already available in the plugins section.

During the activation process the script does a few things such as copying new mobile-specific themes in the themes/ directory.

I would like to be able to control if the activation is successful or not based on a few things, such as if the script was able to copy the files (we noticed permission issues are quite common).

I looked into the various functions that install and update a plugin, but I could not find a proper control system that validates a return code or something generated by the plugin activation to make sure that the process was completed successfully, so I was wondering if there is AT ALL a way of controlling this from a plugin.