The iPhone 5 might be one of the most perfect pieces of technology ever assembled, but it’s taken more than its share of lumps for choosing to go its own way on two key features: mobile payments and maps. Competitors and critics have jumped at the opportunity to point out the handset’s so-called shortcomings, but unsurprisingly, none of it has slowed the iPhone 5’s assault on the record books.

Steve Jobs may be gone, but these moves are right out of his playbook: 1) think different; 2) think ahead.

It’s easy to think Apple has made a critical blunder here--the company has certainly made its share of proprietary missteps in the past--but to write them off as instant failures is not to understand Apple’s ambitions. I tested Maps and Passbook this weekend, and both performed as advertised. My coupon scanned without a hitch at Target, and Maps helped me get to a funeral home in a town I had never been, routing me perfectly, with clear turn-by-turn directions. Nothing about it was revolutionary or groundbreaking (and I was admittedly a bit apprehensive before arriving at my destination), but it was neither disastrous nor worthy of a "gate" suffix.

Back when the Mac was clinging to its single-digit market share and the iPod was just a twinkle in Steve’s eye, he challenged more than his share of status quos. Take Microsoft Explorer. Much like Google, Steve partnered with Bill Gates to preinstall the ubiquitous browser on new Macs back in 1997; but once the ends stopped justifying the means (and the deal expired), Steve released Safari to try to take back some of the mindshare he had relinquished over the previous five years. Of course, Safari lagged behind IE and the other established browsers with its first release, but it gave Apple an immediate foothold in the war; just 10 years later, it holds a nearly insurmountable lead in the mobile space.

Much like those desktop browser wars, the default maps app is indelibly linked to the phone it resides on, and for 6 years, Google has enjoyed that lofty position on both Androids and iPhones. Apple--or maybe Google; we'll never know for sure--no longer wanted to allow the enemy such premium access to its customers, so it set about designing its own Maps app, replacing the default Google one in iOS 6. As expected, it looks great but doesn't perform nearly as well as the app it replaced.

It's easy to fault Apple for forcing such an unfinished product on the masses, but such an undertaking needs room to grow. Google Maps, the gold standard in this arena, was nowhere near perfect in 2007, but over the years, Apple's millions of customers have helped sharpen the edges and fill in the blanks. Now all those complaints and corrections will go straight to Cupertino, where a team of developers is surely working around the clock on an aggressive roadmap of updates. Perhaps this version probably should have been a beta release, but shipping a phone with a beta mapping app isn't the wisest decision.

Passbook, criticized for entirely different reasons, is sure to become infinitely more useful with the coming months. Support has already been added for Target, Walgreens, Fandango and a few others--Starbucks is apparently on board this week--and it's clear that Apple's digital wallet solution will be, if nothing else, far easier for stores to roll out. It's a necessary maneuver before full-on NFC, and we shouldn't be surprised that Apple is taking baby steps here. Bumping phones aside, NFC isn't all that useful if no one will accept the credit card information stored within. Not unlike Maps, Passbook is sort of a test run to see if retailers and consumers will embrace it; if it fails or flounders, we'll probably be waiting a bit longer for NFC on the iPhone, if we ever see it at all.

Maps, on the other hand, isn't going anywhere. Google might think it's hurting all those iPhone users by dragging its feet in a standalone iOS maps app, but really, it's just hurting itself. The longer it waits, the better Maps will get.