[spaghetti]

Just want to point out that back-end improvements alone aren't sufficient to have Apple's Maps be on par with Google Maps. Adding something like Street View to Maps will require non-trivial updates to the iOS app (not to mention the colossal task of gathering and processing the street view data).

[chipotle_coyote]

There's no indication they'll ever have something like Street View -- or rather, what's "like" it is the 3D flyover mode.

In practice the back end is really the main thing that they need to worry about. I'd argue, in fact, that the first order of business is straightening out the point of interest database, which seems to be where the majority of genuine problems are coming from. The second order of business is ensuring cartographic completeness and correctness, i.e., making sure that roads (and even the occasional town) are actually present and in the right place. Things like fuzzy terrain tiles or bad 3D meshes may be the most fun to take screen captures of for point-and-laugh purposes, but it's far more important to me that the maps application can tell me how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge than whether it can render a pretty 3D model of it.