Seems exactly wrong to me - Google uses its free customers as beta testers, whereas its paying customers (Google Apps users) don't get to see the products until a year later.
You don't think Android 1.0, 1.6, 2.1, and 2.2 weren't a beta test of sorts? There wasn't even a software keyboard for a year after Android showed up.
iOS maps is in the same position that AndroidOS was in a year or two after the iPhone appeared. Substandard in comparison, largely functional with big gaps, but an expectation of quick improvement.
You are right they don't "sell" Android to you they enter commercial agreements with manufacturers to provide them with Android enabled with Google Services imposing significant conditions on them.
"Release early, release often" is good advice, and in that sense there's nothing wrong with using customers as "beta testers". No matter how good your QA department is, there're always unanticipated issues when you release at massive scale and push something to dozens of millions of users.
But you don't just rip out something millions of people depend upon for a function as critical as safe navigation in unfamiliar areas and replace it with something that has constant, pervasive issues performing its basic operations. A custom Maps application and dataset is a good business move, but you have to make sure it's at least a minimum viable product before you do the kind of rollout that Apple has done.
When Google replaces Gmail with the shinier "Googmail" and 25%+ of mail to the new service comes back undeliverable, and there's no reasonable method to revert to plain old Gmail, you'll have a comparable quagmire. The fact is that while Apple's Maps may occasionally work sort of well, the failure rates are unacceptably high; too high for anyone to trust the program any more.
It will take years to undo the damage from this, and I fully expect a good portion of people to swap iPhone for Android as a result.
It is a minimum viable product. If Apple maps shipped on the first version of the iphone no one would be complaining about it. As it is it now it takes away features that people are were used to using.
It's not a minimum viable product. If it were, Apple wouldn't be writing this letter. Maybe it would have been viable in the past (also more widely considered viable in the past: paper atlases), but it's not viable today in this context (perhaps it could have been viable as an optional beta, instead of an irrevocable feature regression) as demonstrated by this apology letter. You don't have to write apology letters for viable stuff.
Google's 'beta' is equivalent to spiderman's broadway 'previews'. When they open to the public, start amassing huge amounts of user data, using the public for R&D, call it what you want, the public is paying.
