Also, many devices didn't have built-in GPS (the original iPhone, for one), so how do you run location services? There were, at the time, several crowd-sourced

Also, many devices didn't have built-in GPS (the original iPhone, for one), so how do you run location services? There were, at the time, several crowd-sourced sites of Wifi AP locations, which devices could use to estimate location from Wifi RSSI. So making a private, comprehensive database of the same is a pretty obvious task for a company that is either trying to catalog the world's information, or that wants to do something with location-based services on mobile devices in the future. Beyond that, getting an approximate location first is useful, even if you do plan to use GPS. It takes up to 30 seconds to download the ephemeris for a GPS satellite over the air (assuming no uncorrectable errors), after first locking on to the frequency and PRN of each satellite. Cold-start times of 5 minutes under realistic urban conditions were not unusual. Do you want to wait 5 minutes for the map to load on your phone? However, knowing your approximate location (from nearby APs) narrows the PRN and frequency search space (and you also know which satellites are above the horizon). With ephemeris data downloaded over the internet, every cold start can be as fast as a warm start: Just a couple seconds. There are plenty of reasons to think that Google intended to war drive from the beginning.