That's true, but it's not Google's intent. It's just another source of ad/promotional revenue. The POIs show up before I search anything. A more user focused solution would wait until I selected a destination, detect that where I'm going is a less frequented, and then display something along the lines of "Hey it looks like this location can be difficult to find, here's some near by stores to look for <insert recognizable brands>."

To be fair it doesn't matter what Google's intent is, I use this feature for that purpose all the time.