I'm not making any claims about Apple catching up to "searching" - That truly is a field in which google has demonstrated they have unique, and proprietary advantages over the competition. They have deep research and superior search algorithms, and I would say only Bing can give them competition, and I don't believe Apple will ever be able to provide similar capability when it it comes to that.
But the elements of mapping that are not related to search, that is, routing, displaying tiles, walking directions, cycling directions, turn-by-turn, aerial-view, points of interests - these are all elements that internet data is less useful, and where being able to invest billions of dollars in acquiring suitable cartographic information (as Nokia did) should be sufficient to put together a world class map environment for the customer. My perspective on the challenges is mostly informed through several hours of reading historic postings here: http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=399
In all likelihood, after several billions of dollars invested, Apple 2014 will equal Google 2012 in the areas I just described (mapping sans search).
Think of web pages with POI data (store and restaurant locators are probably the tip of that iceberg), a long history of ___location-related searches including data from "front door" web searches, data on how the results of those searches were used (which Google uses to great effect in other places) and so on.
