You've likely seen Google Maps on a plethora of pages already. What's changed is that now no real technical knowledge will be necessary to feature such maps alongside the content of any of your pages. As Search Engine Land explains:

Yes, currently you can embed maps on your web pages. However, it is not as simple as copy and paste. You need to use the Google Maps API or their applets to make that possible.

This move towards a kind of user generated maps model, moreover, promises to really augment the presence of the Google brand in the social media space, bringing it closer to ubiquity. Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal notes:

If it’s as easy to do as cutting and pasting code [...] you’ll see further proliferation of Google Maps on blogs and other, non-developer generated sites. Even though Microsoft’s “collections” (UG Maps) pre-dates Google’s My Maps, the latter takes mapping personalization farther because it’s easier to use.

What I'm wondering is whether there are going to be any SEO benefits to using Googles Maps embed code. I've noticed in the past that any new site I place Google Adsense on is immediately indexed and begins showing up in the SERPs even if it is only a few hours old, there is scarcely any content, and there are no backlinks leading to the site. The reason is that Google crawls the site the moment you've placed the Adsense javascript on one of its pages.

It's basically the same effect as when you ping Google. As Jeremy Luebke at Marketing Pilgrim has explained before:

With [new] site launches I have noticed some interesting patterns. All of them which I set to ping Google blog search were spidered within minutes and the site was in their index within days. On the sites which I did not ping Google, the sites took weeks to get indexed, even when I pointed strong links towards them.

It is rather likely, then, the something similar will happen with Google Maps. After all, by placing the embed code on for a map on a page, Google will obviously become aware that the page is there. It follows, then, that they'll likely index it quicker than they might otherwise. Furthermore, by virtue of the address used to generated the map, there is the possibility that Google will have a clue as to the what the page is actually about.

For example, if the map features a specific address, and that address is shared by business listed in Google local, Google may very well conclude (rightfully) that the page that the map is embedded on is about that business. Consequently, a local search on any kind of business or service may not only turn up the usual listings, but also yours or my blog posting, and that's precisely the kind of targeted traffic that any blogger or webmaster would be interested in.

The flip side of this coin bears on businesses trying to manage their online reputations. Basically, just like universal search effected reputation management, local search may now too. Specifically, if I embed a map on my blog what was generated by the address of your business, and the name of your business name or related keywords are featured alongside that map, well there is now a chance that my content will show in the SERPs on a local search query.

The result is that third part content about businesses might now be available on local search. If this does prove to be the case, it will be a kind of universal-local search hybrid. In terms of reputation management, moreover, it will represent a double-edged sword for local businesses: both good and bad user generated buzz will become visible on the SERPs of a local search.