I've been working on a duo dock I received recently. The mechanism on mine does work and when the Duo is all the way, the dock works. But the auto suck in mechanism is not great on mine hence I've been messing with it.
For your issue, is the motor not moving at all or you hear the motor doing its thing but the little clips that attach to the Duo don't move or ?
If your motor doesn't do anything, there's two things to check... there's a physical switch near the FPU slot (near the nubus connector) and if that switch isn't depressed, the logic board doesn't think the latching mechanism is installed and/or something's wrong and won't enable the latching mechanism. When the logic board is installed, that switch should be pressed down by a piece of metal and kept down.
Another thing to check is there's an optical switch right next to the physical switch. As the Duo is slid in, there's a sliding piece of plastic in the docking bay that moves backwards and cuts the optical beam on this optical switch. That tells the motherboard to start the motor and pull the Duo in. You may want to use a card or something to block the beam of light in that switch to see if your motor does anything.