Maps is a storm in a tea cup as we've seen from Apple and it's massive sales forecasts for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. Gmail has third party apps. And if Samsung setup their own app store it would be very popular overnight.
Samsung has its own app store. It's popularity is so high that apparently no one on HN knew it existed (despite being shipped on every Android phone Samsung makes).
I've tried it - it is annoying and doesn't work very well. Samsung can't do good software - their best decision every was to align with someone who can.
First, nearly all iPad Minis sold to-date are the WiFi model that doesn't have GPS. Given that, I find it very hard to believe that the quality or even, quite frankly, the existence of an iPad Mini Maps application had any significant impact on those purchasing decisions.
Second, the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 were only available for a small part of their most recent quarter (the last ten or so days of September), so we wouldn't have seen any impact of Maps on those results (especially since people were still discovering the Maps problems at that time). Until Apple reports their results for the holiday quarter, we won't really know how iPhone sales are doing.
Finally, Apple is the manufacturer with the highest customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in the phone industry. That they may have been able to weather a Maps outcry doesn't mean that Samsung or HTC could do the same. In fact, the volatility in the relative rankings of Android manufacturers argues the opposite.
Maps is a storm in a tea cup as we've seen from Apple and it's massive sales forecasts for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. Gmail has third party apps. And if Samsung setup their own app store it would be very popular overnight.