What I want from Google Maps...

I love Google Maps' clean, sharp interface, but there's two things that I wish it would do. 1) Let me look at a street-level map, click on two points and have it show me directions/distance between the two. I realized this during a jog. I wanted to know how far I was running. I had a street corner as a reference point. More detailed than a town name, but less so than an address. But I'm out of luck. 2) When I punch in the name of a small town and returns results, I always zoom out because I want the context of the surrounding towns. But too often, by the time I've zoomed out enough to find a familiar reference point, I've lost site of the town I was searching for. Why can't Google Maps put a red pin point on the town name, just like it does on an address?