Google doesn't have special access to the iPhone, they use the same SDK as everyone else with the exception of a couple of private APIs though that's fairly common.
Yeah, that's the 'special access' I was talking about. Apple tends to reject other people's apps for using private APIs, but they let Google get away with it.
Actually, only blatant violations are rejected. There are a lot of apps out there that make use of a few private API calls so I wouldn't say that Google has "special access."