I'm not sure what it's like in other parts of the country but from the south east cost these are my experiences so far:
A huge swathe of the south east has no aerial photography whatsoever beyond a satellite level where contrails are clearly visible.
I tried requesting a route from my current location to a nearby train station and it gave me a route to a random pub in the next town over - this was for a search term that worked reliably in the old maps app.
Maps themselves show much less information than the equivalent google maps view. There's a fraction of the POI's available and those that are available are often 100m+ off from their actual location.
It is certainly not great where I am (Nottingham). The satellte view is currently, depending on which area of Nottingham you are in, either a vague grey cloud or huge pixelated squares.
I've got a cafe that seems to have appeared three doors down from me in a residential street, and if I search for public transport it suggests the best app for me to get to work on is one for the Paris Metro.
I am a big Apple fan, and although I've also got a Galaxy SII (for work), I've pretty much never felt the need to use that ahead of my iPhone so far. It's just become my go-to phone for mapping though.
Actually, I'll disagree with you there and say that I have found the Apple map tiles to be pretty poor in London. Paddington Station, one of the main commuter rail hubs in the city, is missing entirely (the Underground station got added in recently, but the mainline station remains invisible), and the geo-coder is considerably poorer than Google's.
I develop iOS apps for a living, and I really like the platform. I've also been using the beta for about three months, and frequently I've had to pull my Galaxy S2 out to use the Android maps app. Most people won't have that luxury.
