There are and will be plenty of reviews with in-depth comparison shots. Ars Technica already has a few and I'm sure there will be more to follow. This however is something quite different which makes it a great review.
The point of the location is to make it interesting. Sure, he can go out in any local town and take a bunch of photos of normal stuff, but that would be pretty boring. This type of review is meant to both test the hardware, and be an interesting adventure / trip. You see them frequently switching between 1x and 2x, which I spent a lot of time rewinding and re-watching as someone who does a lot of travel photography through only my phone.
Presumably the trip was planned ages ago, and there was a talk with someone from Apple marketing about sponsoring the trip. Apple needs some good news after the jack event.
That is some seriously seriously ugly bokeh in the image of Mariyane. As someone who has won three emmys for production, I would never present an image like that. The dynamic range however, is really great.
This is probably intentional, to avoid embarrasing false-positives: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33347866