I don't think it will be easy for them to catch up (it would be absurd to say that they can have something better than Google Maps in such a short time).
What bothers me a lot, is that most people blame the data errors to the algorithms or ability of the team to create good software. You can have the best coders in the world, and if they have data that is not good, they can only algorithmically clean it so much.
Google has several vehicles that they drive around and collect all kinds of information themselves. Sure you can hire Navteq (or in Apple's case, TomTom aka TeleAtlas) to go around and do it for you. Guess what? When you license products from either of those companies that means you are relying on their editors. That means no fancy object recognition geotagged image that you can send to a support vector machine to flag an area as needed revision... the product you get from that licensing is the vector line with the attributes already attached to them. So that is what you work with.
Google has an entire army in India, using Google-made custom editing tools that do these things. Unless Apple builds the same, they will always be behind. Can Apple do it? Sure! They have the cash and the talent. Will they? It is up to them to decide if investing 400 million into their mapping infrastructure is worth it. I think it is.
At the same time, Apple has a carefully cultivated history of not shipping half-baked products. They famously worked on tablets for years before they built one that they were happy enough with to ship.
Now, for reasons that the end user surely does not care about, they have taken a product that was missing a key feature or two (navigation, street view) and replaced it with something that is much less reliable even for its fundamental task.
Yes, making a really good mapping application is hard, and requires many people on the ground, around the world. So either you need to make the commitment to do what it takes to deliver that app, or you should outsource the whole thing, and use Nokia Maps or Bing Maps or whatever. The third alternative -- doing it yourself and shipping it to end users before it's ready and without having done all the due diligence -- is likely to be embarrassing.
For instance, in the map of the Shibuya station area in [1], besides the general paucity of detail, note that only roads are considered worth mentioning, although the vast majority of people don't arrive by road. That may fly in Cupertino, but it certainly doesn't fly in Japan. This is not the middle of nowhere—it's one of the most popular places in the largest city in the world, and indeed, is iconic even in the U.S.
The impression one gets is that Apple is way out of its depth here, and given the importance of mapping for smartphone users, that seems a pretty major screwup.
[1] http://www.japanmobiletech.com/2012/09/ios-6-maps-fail-in-ja...
"Sources tell The Verge that Apple began work on the iOS 6 maps system nearly five years ago"
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/20/3363914/wrong-turn-apple-i...
Wow. Just wow. Now we see how strategically brilliant (and utterly necessary) Android actually was.
Given the relative sizes of patent portfolios prior to Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, I wouldn't bet on Google should the IP wars shift to mapping...of course I wouldn't bet on Apple either.
It certainly will be better but I'm not holding my breath about Apple maps surpassing Google Maps any time soon. Google bought a Rasmussen brothers' company (what eventually became Google Maps) in 2004. That's eight years of product development, data collection, storage and refining -- all at Google's pace. Will Apple find some shortcut to compress this time in one-two year? Unlikely.
It's very easy to underestimate the amount of pure, repetitive effort required to build products of this sort and how hard it is to "disrupt" the industries with players like Google.