Google is orders of magnitude better than their competition in search. Apple's customers will be sure to complain if they default to any other search engine.
My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product.
And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)
Baidu is never good, every search I do there seems to turn up mostly porn (and I'm far from searching for porn).
Plus the other benefit of Baidu is that unlike Bing, where you would get a whole bunch of results, only to find that the page was blocked in China for one reason or another, Baidu allowed you to actually work without too much hassle inside that ridiculous censorship system.
Maybe Google was much better at some point in time in the past, but I haven't noticed any meaningful difference these days.
Google's advantage is their massive brand awareness. They've done an outstanding job with brand marketing - positioning themselves as smart and nerdy, so people are inclined to subconsciously think of them as highly performant, even without any evidence to back it up.
I've been using Bing for about a year now and it's almost indistinguishable from Google.
Google seems to be better at heavily semantic queries. For example, just recently I tried "that picture where capitalism is represented as a giant octopus". Bing didn't have the picture I wanted on the first page. Google did but wasn't the first hit.
But for 99.9% of the queries, if you say Google is "order of magnitude better", you're talking out of your ass and my suspicion is you haven't even bothered trying anything else in at least 5 years.
Apple users don't complain that the default Maps app is Apple Maps, despite Apple Maps being a famous punchline.
DDG's results have been better than google's for years now.
From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
Sure, so long as we agree the search results are relevant.