You sound like those soccer moms I make house calls for who just think it's easier to throw away a working system and buy something else.
Normal situational example: I'm in a neighborhood, say Fort Greene, and I'm meeting a friend for dinner at a restaurant I've never heard of in the East Village. First, I need to be able to find that restaurant by searching for it in Maps -- this largely doesn't work anymore. I often get results that are totally incorrect.
But say I do find the location, I then need to figure out how to get there from a neighborhood I don't actively live in. Do I take the A train and transfer to the F and walk from the lower east side? Maybe it's faster to walk to the Q and get off at Union Square. Or maybe the manhattan bridge is under construction, and it actually would be faster to take the G to north Brooklyn and transfer to the L. This subway system is so massive that even native New Yorkers get turned around and need directions.
If you don't actively live in NYC I think it might be hard to realize how significant losing transit directions is, not to mention useful location search.
The same thing is happening here. A lot of people who live in big cities now depend on their phones for directions, and a lot of them need transit directions in addition to driving directions. A phone that can't do that has greatly diminished value. Not everyone wants a phone as a status symbol: some want it to actually do useful things.
And how many people have switched to Mac due to an inferior product feeling? Sure you can still use the computer but if one of the main purposes of having it doesn't work for your needs, why keep using it?
(irrelevant fact: Maps is the MOST important app on the iPhone for me - after the browser, of course. I've put my life on its "hands" an infinite number of times...)