For those purposes yes, I can't disagree and use it myself. However often enough I actually want a map to simply orient myself or get a sense of the geography o

For those purposes yes, I can't disagree and use it myself. However often enough I actually want a map to simply orient myself or get a sense of the geography of a place, and for that purpose Google Maps is rather useless. When you zoom out, everything is just green, no matter if it's actually a forest or not (okay, some areas with agricultural usage have been mapped, but it's far from comprehensive where I live), and when you zoom in everything is just a featureless grey-on-grey, with no way to distinguish between built-up areas and various kinds of open spaces, tree-covered or not. (Only "parks" still get shown in green – and somehow in France Google has decided to include large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds of square kilometres or more in that category, in which case once you zoom in everything in that area is shown on a green background, which is equally useless.)