The trouble here is that, from a user's perspective, this isn't a launch. It's version 6.0 of a product, by which we expect the kinks to be thoroughly worked out.
By replacing Maps with something new that was presented as just an upgrade, they put themselves in a really tough spot that they don't normally do.
Outside the iOS line, Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) is a good example of something that shipped before being really done.
In the iOS line, I'd say iPad 1 is woefully underpowered with RAM. Browsing in Safari suffers due to repaints when scrolling and page reloads.
In 20/20 hinsight, shipping iOS without an SDK and even without a plan for an SDK. If they haven't introduced the SDK, iPhone would probably never had taken off.
The initial iPhone OS, before it was called iOS, shipped without copy and paste or 3G at a time when all mobile operating systems had both copy and paste as well as shipped with 3G on their premium models. The first iPhone certainly qualified as a Premium Device.
The early firmwares were buggy as hell, it would crash from time to time. Heck it was imposible to type with keyboard lag that could be as bad as 10 SECONDS.
My first tweet ever was abot how firmware 2.1 fixed many of this issues, mind you this was 4 years ago
Steve Jobs routinely launched products that were less than perfect. Hence his quote, "real artists ship".