I'm afraid I don't agree with your use of the term "innovative". Regarding Gmail, I'd rather say they managed to clone mutt+procmail for the web in a reasonable manner.

Regarding Maps, the fundamental operations had been in place since at least 2002 at e.g. http://www.nl.map24.com/. Actually I haven't been there for quite some time, and I think in 2002 their interface was actually better than now.