Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences.
I have a theory about these people -- they are the ones who never realized that you could search Maps for place names.
If you search for street addresses, both Maps implementations perform OK. But the strength of Google's database is that you can type almost anything within reason into the Maps search box and get where you want to go. For my first few weeks of iPhone usage, whenever I wanted to find a nearby "Starbucks" or "Barnes and Noble" or $name_of_local_restaurant, I'd do the search in Safari, pick a likely result, and then click on the page's address link, assuming there was one, in order to open it in Maps. Eventually I realized that I could type the search string directly into Maps, and that made life a lot easier. If that stopped working or became less effective on the iPhone that I use for navigation in the car, I would scream bloody murder.
So my guess is that the people who aren't complaining about Apple's maps application are either living in metro areas that were carefully vetted by the data provider, searching for street addresses directly, or both.
I'm not trying to apologize for Apple's mess -- and it is a mess -- but your theory doesn't hold for me.
Some places are genuinely fine: I'm in San Francisco and the maps really are pretty damn good (in SF, I'll actually use the word good). Of course, this is right in Apple's back yard, but the reports seem to indicate that most major U.S. cities are in good shape (mind you, I'm talking about maps & places, not flyover's 3D views, which are a whole different story). And, I legitimately find the link to Yelp's reviews more useful than Google's place markings, but Google's are more consistently available.
Not to say that this isn't a huge mess, but simply that there are places where "Maps is good" ("Maps is great" is a bit much no matter where you are!).
I don't have an iPhone, but isn't the new maps missing public transit data? Does that mean it won't route me through subways, etc, or doesn't even show bus stops and subway stations? And what about bike paths, Google has fantastic labeling of bike routes. As a city dweller, it's good to know they are "accurate", but, from what I've heard, they are missing many key components that would actually help tons in a city. Not trolling here, just asking if maps has that info, and to what degree. Cuz if that is missing from city data, that to me is just as bad as inaccurate maps for a flyover state.
Bus stops and subway stations show up, but you need to launch a third-party app to navigate through them. And some of the third-party apps designated to do this don't work very well.
In New York, the situation is fairly dire. Before, subway stops showed up on the map with the names of the subway lines so you could see that the nearest stop to you was an "R" or a "4/6" or whatever; now that information does not appear on the map at all.
If you use the map and ask for transit directions, that used to just work. Now you get presented with a list of apps it can launch for this purpose, but some of them are terrible and the ratings don't reflect this - you just have to try them at random and see. For instance, there's an app called "Transit" which tells you which stations you want to go between but it doesn't give the names of the subway lines so you don't know which platform to stand on to get the right train. Meanwhile, one of the very best apps for doing New York subway navigation and planning - KICKMap - doesn't even show up as one of the available options from Maps.
In a word, "no." There are 3rd-party add-ons available from the App Store, but those only cover a subset of cities. Also, there don't seem to be routing plugins that can find transit directions across multiple transit agencies the way Google Maps can. So, for example, if you wanted to go from San Diego to Los Angeles, Apple maps couldn't tell you which buses to take on each end of the Amtrak ride.
(Though I had less luck with Hong Kong. For instance, a search for "Big Buddha, Lantau Island, Hong Kong" and every likely English variant just finds the middle of Lantau Island, not the Buddha itself.)
During the beta period it was pretty terrible. Place names that I could see on the map would not show up in search, either as chinese or pinyin. It was better by the time GM was released, though.
Another example: in Saigon, the Mekong was not rendering as water. Imagine being in Manhattan and having big blank yellow spaces where the East and Hudson rivers should be.
I have a theory about these people -- they are the ones who never realized that you could search Maps for place names.
If you search for street addresses, both Maps implementations perform OK. But the strength of Google's database is that you can type almost anything within reason into the Maps search box and get where you want to go. For my first few weeks of iPhone usage, whenever I wanted to find a nearby "Starbucks" or "Barnes and Noble" or $name_of_local_restaurant, I'd do the search in Safari, pick a likely result, and then click on the page's address link, assuming there was one, in order to open it in Maps. Eventually I realized that I could type the search string directly into Maps, and that made life a lot easier. If that stopped working or became less effective on the iPhone that I use for navigation in the car, I would scream bloody murder.
So my guess is that the people who aren't complaining about Apple's maps application are either living in metro areas that were carefully vetted by the data provider, searching for street addresses directly, or both.