Everybody knows by now that the maps are no good. I think that at this point the rage and anger is about overpromising and knowingly shipping an unfinished product of insufficient quality, something Apple has never (arguably) done before.
As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-AI is really hard, and it was better than anything competitors had to offer, which, obviously, is not the case with maps.
...something Apple has never (arguably) done before.
Well, pretty much every 10.x.0 OSX release has had some nasty regressions in it, but they're generally not quite as easy to spot as the maps fiasco. What's worse is that this isn't a new product that starts off a bit crap with the view of improving it over time - there have been a few examples of these as well.
Instead, from the users' point of view, the maps update falls plainly into the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. Users don't give a damn about contracts between Apple and Google. The Maps app has been there since iPhoneOS 1.0 and it's not had any drastic changes since then, despite its tremendous popularity. I find it baffling that they didn't release the new map material as an extra mode with more features (3D, turn by turn navigation), in addition to Google's map material for the classic 2D view until iOS7 comes along. That would probably have completely avoided the problem and given Apple an extra year to get their data into shape. The new features, although a little half-baked, would still have been seen as an improvement by users, whereas now they're just blinded by the seething rage of having the core functionality yanked out underneath them.
I really disagree with your views of the "ain't broke" area. For me and a lot of users it _was_ broken, because it had tiles that didn't zoom properly with a slow connection and didn't have turn by turn. Maps was falling behind, especially with the lack of turn by turn. Even my non-technical friends have been wondering when iOS would finally catch up with Android on that front.
No, but the point is that Apple needed to break away from Google at some point (note: the timeframe to breakaway is subjective). I would say that within 6 months, things will be a lot better for Apple. If they'd stayed with Google, the answer would still be "no" in 6 months.
As it says in the article, the same could be applied to Siri but Siri came with the "beta" warning label, a lot of people understand that voice recognition and that kind of pseudo-AI is really hard, and it was better than anything competitors had to offer, which, obviously, is not the case with maps.