Depending on how you do it and what terrain we're talking about it could be a safer and certainly much more environmentally friendly solution to air travel. But inherently maglev doesn't require vacuum tunnels (or any tunnels - it has a steeper rate of climbing than conventional rail and is an inherently all weather mode of transportation) to work, in fact all previous and current maglev implementations don't use tunnels and look indistinguishable from classic rail to an outside observer.

As to the vacuum tunnel tech - we will need it eventually, and better sooner than later, for phasing out dirty and wasteful rocket launches and substituting them with mass drivers. So international efforts at both maglev and mass driver R&D should cross-pollinate each other.