Apple has encountered some fierce blow-back from its decision to replace Google Maps in iOS 6 with its own home-brewed concoction that seems to have started out with bad directions. Some critics have accused Apple of using it users as cannon fodder in its jihad against all things Google. Others have argued such a screw up never would have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive (as if there were some way to undo that problem) — a criticism that may have reached its peak over the weekend in an op-ed in the New York Times by former business columnist Joe Nocera, who asked, “Has Apple Peaked?” By this morning, however, the backlash to the backlash had set in. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt maintains Apple would have been crazy to keep Google Maps on the iPhone, and that the decision to drop is was almost certainly made long ago, by Steve Jobs. Tech blogger Brian S. Hall calls Nocera “a dumbass” for even raising the question, while Jean-Louis Gassee, in his widely read Monday Note, argues that Apple had no choice and that its critics are being short-sighted.