If they have made any such announcement, their search engine sure can't seem to find it for me...
The trick was to narrow the date range to exclude recent chatter surrounding the actual launch of iPhone 5: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+standalone+maps+ios&#...
While this more than likely means that they are going to create an app, it leaves it open enough that it could just mean that they're going to improve their mobile web app version of maps.
I'd imagine they're hedging their bets. Working on an iOS version while improving the web app version because you never know what will happen in Apple's App review process.