[blooalien]

It's likely to help keep the size of the game data "under control" vs the map data streamed at you by Apple Maps or Google Earth / Street View bein' streamed in small(ish) chunks from a massive database of texture data stored on corporate server disk pools.

[Stevvo]

You get much a much higher LOD in the simulator than on Google; gaming GPUs have a lot more to work with than integrated/consumer GPUs. Google Earth just looks better sometimes because the source data and reconstruction is better. They are really dedicated to in-house photogrammetry for many years, when Microsoft/Bing have just been buying data from 3rd parties.

[initplus]

The game actually streams in much of its contents also. They still stream in the satellite ground textures, but they don't use these to texture models in the same way as Google/Apple maps.