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To get out of that bind, Apple has never needed to make a product that's actually superior to Google Maps. What they've needed to do is produce an application that clears two bars. One is that it has to be good enough that your typcial doesn't-care-too-much phone consumer doesn't reject iOS out of hand. The other is that it has to be good enough such that if Google doesn't want to lose the entire iOS customer base it has to scramble and release a great Google Maps app for iOS and not just for Android. Apple's Maps app easily clears both of those bars. Before the release of iOS 6, the inferiority of Apple's Google-powered iOS Maps app to Android's Google maps was a real reason to prefer an Android phone. Today, there is no such reason. Not because Apple Maps is as good at Google Maps, but because Google Maps for iOS is as good as Google Maps for Android.
This was actually part of the original Chrome strategy as well. While Google released the product because long-term they couldn't afford to have their biggest competitor (at the time) controlling the majority of their usage, they also did it to push Internet Explorer to innovate so that Google could deliver a better and faster experience for its customers. By entering the browser market Google was able to light a fire under Microsoft that a company like Firefox never could and the versions of IE that followed were a thousand times better than what had existed before.