>For most people the 3D is an amusing toy, not really useful. I'd be happy without it frankly.
The complaints about the "zigzagging" are about the 3D viewer, hence, my comment about 3D.
>They have data for searching on street addresses and towns, and the data is available separately for postcodes etc (TomTom for example will have sold a solution for this to Apple, so they could have gone down that route). Google has this down, as you'd expect given their search expertise, and Apple would have done better to pay them at least for access to this service if nothing else as it's a complicated area.
To have good geocoding, you need to have line segments with correct ranges and topologically accurate (for example splits in the right intersection taking in consideration overpass/underpass and grade changes - the 3D stuff you don't care about - along with no dangling edges). If you think OSM fits this bill in a world-wide dataset you are incorrect. Go ahead and download the entire dataset and see for yourself planet.openstreetmap.org.
> Yelp does, and that's who Apple are using for POIs
Actually, yelp only has coverage in the US and in the few outside countries they are in. Most of the world is not covered by Yelp's POIs, so sorry, but "Yelp" is not a worldwide solution for POIs - which is what Apple needs.
> One other point you didn't mention is that OSM doesn't do satellite data (their stuff is from Yahoo isn't it?), so that is a big area Apple would have had to sort out from another provider.
Yahoo, nor google, nor anybody else have their own satellite providers. That data usually comes from GeoEye, Digital Globe or any other satellite image provider. But yes, you are right, "OSM" has nothing to do with raster data as a whole (except for the elevation-derived contours they have in some places).
Fixing OSM for anything else than displaying maps is a huge undertaking. Then, when you are done, you basically have to share the data with everybody else (including Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Mapquest etc etc). OSM is the GPL of databases, so for some use cases, it is not the best choice, for other ones, it is.
The post I replied to claim "Apple just pick OSM", and my answer remains... it would not have solved any of the issues that people are complaining about.