We’re kind of the lucky recipients of what is a much larger marketplace. I only know that it exists, I don’t know what they actually do with the data. But, basically, what has been explained in at least one of the Developer Q&A’s / Partner videos, is that there’s kind of a battle going on to capture the world in 3D. Smaller cities can be done faster, so they kind of get a priority. Not to mention, as a vendor, you want to claim you’ve got something to sell the other guys don’t.
Another problem is, the process takes time and I imagine is relatively expensive (?). So, if we capture 1/10th of the world at a time, you can see that pretty quickly data gets out of date by as much as 10 years or more. The newer stuff will be higher resolution because of newer technology. Etc. But, I’m pretty sure that’s it in a nutshell.