Yes, if he'd wanted to make the PR disaster even worse than it already was. Can you not imagine the furore had they denied it? Since they'd already approved other maps and navigation apps it would have been blatant discrimination against Google. Might even have been lawsuit territory.
The only furore would be from people like you and your tech blogging friends. It was Google themselves that didn't think it would be accepted in the first place.
Yes, they did. Think.
The iPhone 5 had just been launched, and mapping/GPS is a pretty important feature for many smartphone users. Apple had to reassure buyers that they could get decent maps on their iPhone 5 straight away, or it could have decimated sales. Taking a hard "you'll use our maps and like them or you'll eat them for breakfast" line would only have made it worse.
I'm thinking but its making my head hurt. Clearly you can look at sales numbers and see the maps debacle didn't hurt them very much. I mean they still broke all their intro sales numbers, even after every tech blog decreed them to be total crap. So, I guess its not as important to most people as you think.... or hold on to your hat(e), the maps app isn't as bad as people say! Eeegads!
Personally, I was all set to get an iPhone 5 until I upgraded my iPad to iOS 6, opened Maps, hit 'Satellite' and saw a black-and-white cloudbank where my house used to be. That's fixed now, but the question in my mind was "What's Apple going to wreck next in order to spite the competition? Gmail/contact/calendar sync? Dropbox/Google Drive?
Oh there was a cloud over 1 sq mile of the 196,900,000 sq miles that is our planet. Clearly Apple is wrecking anything and everything in order to.... wait, what good does it do them to wreck everything? Oh thats right, they are in business to spite their competition. Looks like spiting your competition pays pretty good.