I'm in London, and I'd say it's a small step backwards. The points of interest from Yelp appear to be consistently off by about 10 metres, and many points of interest are missing altogether. I do like the way you can click on a point of interest, which is something you couldn't do in the old Maps app.

So far, all the addresses I've tried are correct, and the driving directions and speech recognition are a step forward. The tube/bus directions from Google were always inaccurate, so I was already using a dedicated app.