The one big difference here though is that it's very hard to tell if a cloud service is ready before you subject it to real traffic.
A lot of the problems people are having with maps seem glaringly obvious and a lot of developers were raising red flags on this during the iOS 6 beta.
Jobs was a marvelous CEO, but Apple made many missteps – some larger than the current uproar over iOS 6 maps app – while he led the company. Without having personally knew the man, one cannot claim what SJ would have done in this situation. Plain and simple.