User interface is far more important. The majority of use cases were people looking for directions to places in non-satellite view. Google maps was the first o

User interface is far more important. The majority of use cases were people looking for directions to places in non-satellite view. Google maps was the first one where you could simply drag a fullscreen map around with your mouse and zoom with mouse wheel. I suspect it wasn't until after this user interface enhancement that people even bothered exploring satellite views much.