Apple Maps' reputation is much worse than it deserves. These days it is better than Google Maps, in my opinion: Better map pins, better graphical performance, better rendering style, better search.
edit: just tested Apple Maps with a couple searches I did in Google Maps yesterday. Searched for the carrier shops for the two biggest carriers in my country. First search took me to Australia. The other ones found nothing in my city (there are probably at least 10-20 of each carrier in this town) and zoomed out to country level. Still completely and utterly useless.
That said, I'm no big Google Maps fan either, they have a lot of data issues as well. I tend to use a local app which works much better for public transit and car navigation, and has a nice category drill-down for POIs which works around a lot of the issues with free-text search
I haven't used it since launch, so can't comment on its current performance, but AFAICT its reputation is due to how poor it was at launch. I tried it with three locations that Google Maps handled fine (small sample I know, but enough to put me off trying it further), and had problems with all three results (my house: low-res satellite imagery; my College: wrong website address; Cambridge Union Society: correct details, but location was about 50mi out).
Hopefully its now better, but that initial impression is hard to shake.
Edit: initially -> initial
They need to get some more of the driving GPS features figured out and I'll switch over entirely.
It has gotten so bad, that I've dusted off my old stand-alone GPS and keep it in my car's center console. Google Maps no longer has reliability that I can count on for a road trip.
Seriously? I can't see how that would happen unless you're living somewhere prone to dramatic road rebuilding. Or do you mean the quality of the Google Maps interface?