Un-fucking-believable. The CEO of Apple has come right out and admitted that Maps is sub-par, and the Apple fans are still trying to pretend that the problems are not real.
I also think that's why Apple released it: there are genuine improvements in some areas, but they underestimated how important the missing features are to some people. For some people, the transit features are the reason to use Maps, so it's obviously inferior for them.
How much clearer does it need to be? He comes out and says, right there, that the parts that aren't outright missing are fine. This is not my experience, nor is it the experience of many other people I've talked to.
1. Check out the location of my new house. Apple's data is years old and predates the whole development. The area is new, but not THAT new. Google and OpenStreetMap both have it fine.
2. Use it to navigate to a park I'd never been to before. Get told "you have arrived" while going under an interstate overpass. Find a driveway to pull off in, spend about ten minutes screwing around with the park's web site verifying the address, finding a better map, etc., finally figure out that the app sent me about half a mile in the wrong direction down this road. Google, of course, has the correct location for the address.
3. Use it to navigate to a restaurant I'd never been to before. "You have arrived" happens in front of a tiny strip mall with no restaurants. Wander around the area for a while and finally find it. Later on I check to see what happened, and it's pretty incredible. Maps had been opened with a link of the form, Restaurant@latitude,longitude. Stripping off the "Restaurant@" portion gives the correct location. With the restaurant name in it, Maps ignored the lat/lon and preferred its POI data, which was just plain wrong.
At that point, I gave up on the thing. Note that this is not the sequence of bad experience that were interspersed with good ones. These are the only experiences I had in using the thing, aside from two trivial tests navigating to and from day care which I do almost every day anyway.
Many other people I've talked to report similar experiences. Addresses are misplaced, POIs are misplaced, stuff is mislabeled or severely out of date, etc.
(By the way, the above is response is much more constructive than saying "un-fucking-believeable" in response to someone who is not aware of problems.)