I've used Apple Maps as my primary mapping system since it came out with only one glitch. Google Maps provided me directions before that and screwed up multiple times, once sending me down a road it had listed as a paved road that was rough between the potholes big enough to swallow a volkswagon. Apple Maps navigated around that particular area without using that almost nonexistent road, and Apple Maps route was shorter by three miles.
There was a concentrated FUD campaign mounted by Google to denigrate Apple Maps when it came out to emphasize a few definite and AMUSING problems in the very new 3D LIVE on-the-fly graphics Apple was implementing, and also some issues using YELP in trying to connect in searching by Business Name instead of address, to provide a more up-to-date way of providing local data. . . which did not work well for overseas location data, or for out-of-data data, because Yelp did not have an adequate means other than crowd-sourcing and reliance on businesses themselves to update data. Nor, for that matter, does Google in the long run.
Before you claim that Nokia had a workable solution, they did not. They had pre-calculated 3D views done of specific known locations. Not on-the-fly fly-around real-time 3D views.
Because these few glitches were quite amusing, they got lots of headlines. People were expecting magic and got it, but not perfecttion.
Tim Cook SHOULD have labeled Maps as a beta and the problem would have been solved. . . but to uncover these glitches required large numbers of users. As I stated, when Google Maps implemented 3D two or three years later they had just as many and just as hilarious problems until they could figure out software algorithms to extract the more esoteric issues of separating buildings, bridges, and trees from background.
As I pointed out, Apple Maps is leaps and bounds better now than the released version. . . and was so in about six months after the release. When the SIX EPIC FAILS have to do with minor glitches from amusing renderings of a new feature, leased data from a successful 3rd party mapping service which would have provided the SAME directions to their millions of users, or a politically correct meme which would not be used for finding directions, it's a FUD campaign, intended to ridicule the product. YOU posted your comment as though Apple Maps were still as glitchy as the release, and no improvements have been made. I pointed out that it is not.