It's not satellites
"Overall Google gets my vote, even though its satellite imagery is often extremely out of date 10 years+ old
It's satellite imagery is usually very up to date, within a few months or so. What you're complaining about is the aerial photography which shows the much higher zoom levels where individual roads and buildings, and even cars and people, are visible. Satellites are easy, they just sit way up in the sky and constantly take pictures of the whole world every few days. Constantly chartering flights to photograph every inch of every country every few weeks is different matter entirely, and is not something anyone is willing to pay to do.
As for Streetmap, the problem is that, as others have noted already, the maps might be decent but the interface is a decade or so out of date. And since the maps aren't actually theirs but are just OS maps, they're not giving people any reason to care about them - there are plenty of other places you can get OS maps. And that's a large part of why this lawsuit was rather pointless - even if it was ruled that Google was abusing its dominance, Streetmap wouldn't gain any advantage because Google would be forced to open things up to all their competitors, not just one of them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
