Hi there,
Concerning geolocations within Core libraries, we have support for locations and some calculation support. CoreLocation is nice and convenient, but somehow GPS- and Hardware-centric and concerning calculations quite limited.
But nowadays geotagged items are available in different shapes and often go beyond a single point (tons of photos, tracks, buffers, point-in-polygon, WMS-server, ….), and on the other end we have the high-level MapKit-framework which is a presentation layer and quite Apple-centric.
I suggest Swift could offer something in between like CoreGeo, which has no graphical user interface, but is kind of an enhanced CoreLocation with spatial projection and calculation engines for raster and vectors.
Something like GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library, http://www.gdal.org) offers a well-defined layer for georeferenced spatial data and GDAL (fortunately…!) still offers a decent and complete C-style interface, which allows easy bridging with swift.
With a GDAL-like CoreGeo, development of truly spatial oriented applications would be much more consistent and the development of geospatial related applications would be much more attractive for education, science and commercials. CoreGeo does not conflict with MapKit-framework or other existing mapping API's (ESRI,MapBox,…).
It is maybe a naive proposal and I have no relations to GDAL ( I am just an application guy), but I think it is time that operating system should include spatial data handling at the core.