Not being the iPhone expert, isn't the whole thing with iPhone that the apps are essentially closed once you switch to other apps. As long as they turn on quickly and maintain state, does it really matter if they stay on in the background?

Exactly. I do like it when there are things that can continue processing in the background but other things like maps don't need to be constantly on as long as whenever I turn it on it jumps me to my current location and continues tracking where I'm trying to get to.

It would be different if maps has a proximity alert, telling me when I'm within an hr. or 5 miles or whatever but none have that. On my N900 Maps suck up my batteries and on vacation it's a pain so I have to turn it off. Whenever I need to track progress that means re-entering all necessary data which takes a long time. With iOS you just turn it on and it goes to where you relative to where you want to go.

I wish the Linux guys would look at mobile devices and understand that multitasking that you'd do on a desktop is not necessarily the same as for mobile usage and that they should have a multitasking framework that allows for both.