[bambax]

Yes, absolutely. They seem to be imprinted on the tiles, too, you can't filter them out with an ad-block rule.

The API doesn't show all this in satellite (aerial view) mode, so sometimes it's tempting to use a service that relies on the maps API.

But even with the API it seems that now the maps view has all those pins for places; I seem to remember it wasn't always the case, but I'm not sure.