Your correct, ESRI tools are a de facto standard for map creation. However when your doing dynamic map creation or real time situational awareness the ESRI too

Your correct, ESRI tools are a de facto standard for map creation. However when your doing dynamic map creation or real time situational awareness the ESRI tools perform poorly. There are better commercial products on the market and free oss tools available such as OpenSceneGraph with the OSGEarth plugin.