Why can't they pull the same information from the towers and wifi APs themselves though ? They are big enough provider to have this sort of analytics support already in place.
It's not that they can't pull the information from the towers, it's that the information isn't very good. If you have a real GPS fix and you upload that fix to Google along with the tower, they can start building a very accurate map of where what towers/APs are where. Then when somebody comes along that doesn't have a GPS fix, they can get a better fix than they could otherwise.
Tower-based cell tracking (triangulation based) generally has the precision of several meters if not better. That's more than enough for building very accurate map. Though there's a chance Palm is not allowed to access this information without a warrant, which would explain why they are using alternative collection methods.
I've noticed that of friends with GPS-phones, the tower tracking is always horrendous. Generally it is enough to get you into the right part of the city, but not enough to do any real navigation with.
