Sounds like a good move. It's important to signal to the entire Apple organization that nobody is untouchable if they screw up. Apple's culture is generally pretty tolerant of mistakes as long as people fix them quickly. I think in this instance, the problem was that 1) He didn't publicly accept responsibility for the problem. and 2) He couldn't fix the problems fast enough.
I know that right after the maps issues came to light, I suddenly got a bunch of recruiting emails from the Apple mapping team. Sounds like the team was caught flat-footed and didn't really have a solid plan to immediately fix things. When you have a pressing and urgent systems engineering problem, I definitely think it's a bad idea to suddenly distract your team with tons of recruiting interviews. Building a good team takes a lot of time and focus. I would normally assume that Apple would transfer their best engineers from other teams to fix the maps app, but maybe Scott didn't have enough goodwill built up within the organization to make that happen.
I know that right after the maps issues came to light, I suddenly got a bunch of recruiting emails from the Apple mapping team. Sounds like the team was caught flat-footed and didn't really have a solid plan to immediately fix things. When you have a pressing and urgent systems engineering problem, I definitely think it's a bad idea to suddenly distract your team with tons of recruiting interviews. Building a good team takes a lot of time and focus. I would normally assume that Apple would transfer their best engineers from other teams to fix the maps app, but maybe Scott didn't have enough goodwill built up within the organization to make that happen.