The question that needs to be answered is: "Why did Apple flip the switch now, when their infrastructure is in such a poor state?" I think John Gruber answered

The question that needs to be answered is: "Why did Apple flip the switch now, when their infrastructure is in such a poor state?" I think John Gruber answered this question pretty well in his piece last week [1]. His answer is essentially that there's no great time to force a change like this, and time was running out for a variety of reasons. It was crunch time, and Apple needed to either jump off the Google Maps ship or try and broker a temporary deal until their solution was baked a bit more. They jumped. For what it's worth, I think they made the right decision there, but the wrong decision in the way they sold it to the public. They seem to be recanting as much as possible - see Cook's apology, their rewording of the iOS 6 Maps marketing message and the App Store section for other maps apps and so on. I think in the long run they'll be fine, just like with all the other -gate uproars, but for the moment they've given a lot of fodder to tech journalists and bloggers that probably could have been avoided. [1]: http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/timing_of_apples_map_switch http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/timing_of_apples_map_switc...