Is street view anything more than a fringe benefit? Google Maps got popular long before they had it. As long as you've got detailed street maps, ideally with actual stores and whatnot at their addresses, that should be enough to roll out.
A map application by itself is certainly useful, but streetview provides certain benefits that a map alone doesn't provide. For my uses it is critical. Every year I take a 7 day vacation with my father on our motorcycles. Streetview allows me to gauge to scenic quality of the road, if the satellite quality is bad, it allows me to see if the road it paved. It allows me to find out if Folsom, Torreon, or Lukachukai and other tiny towns we pass through have a gas station. I don't know much about the 3D stuff apple is working on, but I have my doubts that it will be able to do the above in remote places. I'm sure it will still work well as a map, but streetview provides real benefits that cant really be gotten without driving the road.
Anecdotal data point: I've just had a look at Street View to plan a short trip to a part of town I've never been before. I use it to look at complex crossroads where I need to take a turn so it will look familiar when I get there. I do not use a GPS for that kind of trips (it would be overkill.) So for me Street View is what makes google maps so useful.
I've found it very useful on more than one occasion, but that's not why it's so important. Rather it's that as a result of their Street View mapping Google has developed an extremely accurate map database of even obscure corners of the world which in turn has allowed them to offer turn-by-turn navigation for those areas.
I didn't know that, but in that case it would make sense if causation was the other way around: that Street View was a by-product of "develop[ing] an extremely accurate map database of even obscure corners of the world".
"We're gonna be driving around all these places anyway. Let's stick a camera on top of the cars when we do it."
When I go to a job interview, I like to check what the street looks like and where is the entry of the building. It relieves some anxiety (although it didn't prevent me from getting completely lost once). Street view is one of the most useful features of online maps.
When we were looking to buy a house, Street View allowed us to see what the neighboring area looked like; listings rarely include details like "surrounded by three auto-repair shops" or "half of the houses on the block look abandoned".
Street view or ISO (bird's eye) view are both indispensable to me, because they show store fronts instead of roofs. When I'm driving around, I can't see the roofs, so that does me no good.
