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I think it would be more advantageous for them to heavily invest in promoting Open Street Maps (OSM) contributions and editing. Make it easy, integrate into OSM (although MapBox is doing a fantastic job with the iD editor). Get that up to snuff and then start using solely OSM data... but that's a blue sky and Apple isn't exactly renowned for its use of OpenSource data / software.

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That's a clever idea. Apple absolutely makes use of Open Source, but only when it makes strategic sense, not out of idealism. (Examples: BSD->OSX, khtml->WebKit, LLVM.) In this case Apple needs a way to massively upgrade the quality of their data-set (they still have fundamental errors right in San Francisco! presumably Cupertino near 1 Infinite Loop is sorted by now). They do not want to be in the business of cultivating a gigantic geographic database, so aligning themselves with the many others out there who would like access too a Google Maps quality db is quite clever. They would have to think carefully about how to present this, to make it clear the data is not theirs, in case there are any horrendous gaffes in it.

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