It will improve sooner than that. Apple has been rapidly making deals with data providers in each country. They never had those in place at launch which was why it was so bad.
Look, don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of being able to catch up. I was part of a small group of folks that took GCC's compiler technology from late 80's to state of the art in the mid 2000's by cherry picking the best of the best from research of the past 20 years. It worked. In 5-6 years, we were able to get within 1-2% of the best compilers at normal opt levels.
But it still took 5-6 years. Getting good takes time. There is no magic fairy dust. The secret to getting the last 25% of the way there in anything is hard work and lots of tuning. There is no magic bullet that will suddenly fix everything.
I'm quoting John Siracusa, because I think what he said makes a lot of sense: Google does brute force (i.e., driving cars all over the world and having thousands of real people auditing the maps data), but Apple wants to get its data using "clever" algorithms. Clever algorithms is what caused [1], and countless other issues.
What I said above is debatable, but the next statement is (I think) absolutely non-negotiable: Until we see Apple Maps (or one of its partners') cars driving around the world (the whole world, mind you - not just US and EU), its data will be demonstrably worse than Google's. It might be good and usable, but still will be worse than Google's :)
[1]: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/11/apple-fixes-australian-m...
They have cars as well. And they've had them for DECADES before Google. And it's not like Google is driving around continuously updating their data. For example Street View in many parts of my city is over 3 years old and still missing many newer suburbs.
So no. Google does not have a brute force approach. They have just had longer to perfect their algorithms.
See the frequently referenced: http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=399
It's also worth noting that Apple's local POI search has been a particular pain point. Thinking it will be easy to match or outdo Google here (when Google Maps often pops up the right POI as a suggestion when I've typed as few as three characters) is foolhardy.
If you do a POI search e.g. Sydney restaurants in Google Maps you can scroll down to see the attribution e.g. "Business listings distributed by Yellow Pages". Likewise for most other countries.
But hey I will grant you that Google Maps has a better autocomplete.
> And sorry but Google doesn't own any POI data either.
Some of Google's recent acquisitions would beg to differ:
http://www.wired.com/business/2011/09/google-buys-zagat/
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/13/technology/google-frommers/i...
And, unless you know differently, I'm pretty sure Google owns Google Places...
I think you might be a little bit dated in your understanding. Google any random city on maps.google.com. Look at the fine print at the bottom: "Map data ©2012 Google"
I remember what that used to say a 4-5 years back. Copyright NAVTEQ. They have been quite busy.
The Yellow Pages attribution you see doesn't necessarily mean all data came from Yellow Pages, just that some may have.