I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a timetable of a bus stop and a route of the bus to be show on the map.

Try planning a route in an unfamiliar area with this slow an UI when you are standing outside and there's no place to sit and rest, and you need to click around on a bunch of stops just to see what busses are going through a stop and where they are heading.

So yes, optimization is still important.

We replaced the glorious and easily iterated and expanded google maps app with a photograph of a public transport map, and we could get an answer of how to get from any A to any B within seconds of looking at the map without typing or searching or waiting for anything.

Which also shows that, sometimes, slow software is less than useless.