The video is worth a watch. The part where he tilts the 2D map into a 3D perspective is awesome. Apparently, they are using vectors instead of tiled images which allows them to now do touch rotations and other cool stuff.
Yeah, this is fantastic. When he shows the demos and talks about the engineers building it, it really sounds like Google has told their developers to "build the future....and, go!" Unbelievably cool stuff.
I enjoyed that feature, but the gesture feels backwards. Seems that a swipe up rather than down would be better for rotating to an oblique angle. Imagine a rotating whiteboard (e.g. http://j.mp/g2KHGc). Standing in front of it, you'd want to push on the top half ("swipe up") to rotate the face upwards.
Alas, lag when scrolling/panning/rotating is still noticeable.
That was my immediate first impression, but remember it's rendering vectors, and they're in 3D!