Oh yes, Google's colour scheme seems heavily geared towards the map only ever serving as an inconspicuous geographical background for displaying routing information or POIs.

When you actually want to use it as a map in its own right, it's absolutely infuriating, though – forests disappear when you zoom in, the distinction between built-up areas and surrounding open space does so likewise, so all you're left with is lots of faint white streets on a light grey background with some random green spaced dotted around.