Apple fails at social-interaction. They have no feedback loops, no community involvement. Compare to google where the community-feedback loop is almost a part of the product culture.
Waze has social integration (facebook), realtime community reporting (speed), realtime community hazard reports (object on road), community map editing (tweak routes, add roads).
I can't believe that Apple is so good at making "beautiful" things but so bad at community engagement (gamecenter, ping, maps, *.mac, etc).
Apple's DNA is wired to produce singular, curated experiences. That's damn-near antithetical to writing software that's explicitly inclusive of other input and needs to cater to the broadest audiences possible, to hit the network effect.
Nintendo is much the same way.
And there's no shortage of examples of artists who turn out phenomenal works but are notoriously difficult to work with and dismissive of criticism or collaborative efforts.
Correct, the tiles were from Google and Google got first cut of the route information. But Apple was the one collecting vectors, and there's no reason to think they were ever signing those over to Google.
I'm sure that even if they weren't explicitly sharing the traffic information with Google then Google was capable of (roughly) inferring the data based on API calls anyway. While there would certainly be some noise there between new tile fetches, you should be able to map out routes and speeds with a high (though not exact) level of confidence, particularly in cases where you're probably the one originally laying out the suggested route.
Waze has social integration (facebook), realtime community reporting (speed), realtime community hazard reports (object on road), community map editing (tweak routes, add roads).
I can't believe that Apple is so good at making "beautiful" things but so bad at community engagement (gamecenter, ping, maps, *.mac, etc).