Few people consider yahoo or bing search comparable in quality to google.
So what parent finds odd, is that Apple is asking the best in class to pay them, to improve their product.
I understand that someone reading HN would find that hard to believe, but when I look at some people around me who are not working in tech - many wouldn't be able to tell difference between Bing and Google search results. All they know is they can type/say a query and get the site they are looking for. The only time they would start thinking about underlying tech. is if they started to consistently get unusable results.
Google results are better, but how many people are actually aware of that (outside IT crowd) is questionable.
Maybe today Bing and Yahoo are competitive, but back when the iPhone was released, it was quite different.
Tested and true.
In the case of Apple, they have numerous other highly valuable directions they could go with a piece of real estate on the iPhone, including selling it to Microsoft or Yahoo.
It would be like claiming that because every free app in existence isn't included by default on a phone, said non-included app/s must therefore have a negative value. My phone for example did not come with kik or viber pre-installed, therefore they have a negative value (not true).