Well, at least he would have had a right to it. With free services you can expect to get what you paid for, with a paid service I think the bar is a little higher.
If google maps stopped working tomorrow and your business depended on it I really wonder who you would look to to complain.
Email is of course a different matter and I think they handle account disabling in a very silly way at google. But it's still much better than at PayPal for instance (and technically speaking you do pay for PayPal).
There is a paid version of Google Maps, costs $10k/year. It is required if you develop a private application (ie. not open for everybody).
well, technically speaking you do pay for Google as well, just not in the traditional way of handing money in return for something, but the more ancient way of handing something in return for something.
This seems to imply that if he were paying money for his Google account he would have either been safe or gotten prompt customer service if it suddenly stopped working.
That has, sadly, not been my recent experience.