What makes Forstall so great? If he's truly worthy of that comparison, perhaps Apple should buy him along with Snap; it would be hilarious if Snapchat turned out to be the NeXTSTEP of this generation.
Scott Forstall combined Steve Jobs's sensibilities and obsessive attention to detail with a deep, working background in software engineering. He championed UI usability and responsiveness, spearheaded accessibility initiatives out of care rather than for PR, and led the OS X, iOS, and Safari teams through arguably their best and most reliable years.
Scott Forstall is why the iPhone was the iPhone. Tony Fadell was almost why the iPhone was an iPod.
To be fair Jobs seemed to be a big fan of skeumorphism too - the leather stitching on the Calendar.app was supposedly modelled on Jobs's Learjet so it can't all be attributed to Forstall.
Whilst this was a big blunder, the Apple Maps project was an absolutely enormous undertaking. The Google Maps app itself had an almost 10 years head start, beginning life in 2003 at a startup which Google purchased. I think it's impressive what Apple managed to put out even though it fell far short of Google's work.
They had one. Tim fired him.