midrand: Yes, but when you are driving fast, you do need this assistance which anyone thinking about the user would have made to auto zoom in and out (like.... navigation system in your real world car maybe?)
The city is not memorable enough for me to easily navigate through the landmarks, so I will not remember my way around without route navigation.
ASnakeNeverDies: I originally expected the mini map to be implemented diegetically on vehicle dashboards rather than just being part of the HUD by default, for immersion purposes and to further separate cars from motorcycles. It could otherwise have been added specifically to the display data through cyberware augmentation. It would, however, take up valuable slots better spent on more useful things. I've found the mini map redundant and I disagree that the city is not memorable enough to allow for autonomous navigation through landmarks, I believe the layout and its set dressing are the only things that this game actually did well.
Well - does not work for me. Apart from the area around the apartment, I don't really remember the rest of the layout after spending 70 hours+ in game. Skyscrapers and multi-level layout makes things more complex and I don't remember them. Certainly not going out of my way to specifically memorise the city if it doesn't come naturally (as it does in some other games like GTA).
Perhaps if the quests deliberately took you to all parts of the city equally and linked them to memorable buildings then yes, I would have memorised it. But this is not the case as quests are concentrated very much in and around Watson.