Your experience also represents the bulk of the problems I've had. I'm in the Chicagoland area, and the POI data and roads have been pretty good. But the search doesn't seem to prioritize nearby locations. If your search string exactly matches the name of some town, anywhere in the world, it tends to give you that result.
Echoes my experience as well. I searched for a nearby street and ended up getting the same street further away. It directed me away from Manhattan and into another borough.
