Google maps comes back to iOS 6

Google now has a maps available again on iOS 6 devices.  It is clear why Apple wanted to make their own maps app and this has been discussed elsewhere but it is unclear why it took Google so long to get their maps app approved.  Was it due to development time or approval delays?  Perhaps Google just wanted to let Apple's map problem fester for a little while before jumping in to help save the day.

In any case, Google's new map app seems to be working well.  I tested it on two locations that have given Apple's maps and some of the other maps apps problems.

The Portland Ballet was not found found in any other map app that I tried.  (Apple Maps, Waze, etc.)

Searching for "Ridgewood Elementary" on Apple Maps directed me to a New York City school with a different name instead of the school a half mile from my location.

I ran the new Google Maps apps on my 3rd generation iPad with iOS 6.0.  It is an iPhone app rather than a universal app but it runs fine and rescales nicely with the 2x button.  See the screen above.  I may download for my iPhone to test but now I feel comfortable enough with the mapping options to get an iPhone 5.

Apple has announced that Siri is going to be available on the new iPad but that it will still not be available on  phones that preceded the iPhone 4s.  This seems puzzling since the computational load for Siri is handled by Apple's massive data center(s). 

Similarly, the new Apple maps app for iOS 6 seems like it will be limited to iPhone 4s and later phones.  

Programmers on jailbroken iPhone 4's have long since been able to get Siri running and were able to do so with the mapping app only a few days after release.  Withholding Siri from the iPhone 4 has probably encouraged thousands of users around the world to jailbreak their phones.  

Certainly if third party programmers could do it, Apple could do it too but why won't they?  

The easy answer is that they want to encourage people to upgrade their phones.  Of course this seems plausible but they are "fragmenting" their own OS (albeit to a much slighter extent than Android's tremendous fragmentation problem.)  

Perhaps there is not a possibility - I've got a theory that I have not heard mentioned anywhere else.   There could be a contractual relationship with Google that prevents Apple from cutting out or replacing Google services on iOS devices released before the iPhone 4s.  

Just a theory, what do you think?